


the blue tide pulling me under

by frozennightmare



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Canon-Typical Drug Use, M/M, Magical Realism, canon-typical anxiety shit, horrific mangling of hockey facts, vauge mentions of actual hockey players and teams
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-16 07:30:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7258225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozennightmare/pseuds/frozennightmare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Craigslist ad had been pretty explicit about it wanted; LOOKING FOR A THIRD PERSON TO SHARE A LEASE IN PROVIDENCE, RI. MUST BE CHILL WITH NAKEDNESS, WEED, AND LOTS OF PAINT. I DON’T GIVE A FUCK OTHERWISE. SHIT, BE A FUCKING WIZARD.<br/>Well, that Eric could deliver on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is a pretty indulgent au of mine with general handwaving in the direction of established fantasy rules.  
> content warnings for language and canon-typical drug use and anxiety mentions  
> listen, this is my "stress-relieving funzies" piece so im not gonna make any promises about updates. this is just fun to write.  
> title from shark by oh wonder

The world is softer on the ice.

It’s not a thing that makes any sense, and he can’t pass it on to a reporter, because hockey is chaos. Hockey is the pushback of glass and the sharp cracks of sticks and the whine of skates shredding crystals.

But the white- the white has always helped him. The sheer absence of color it causes, the way he can look down at the ice and feel as if all the extra is being sucked out of him- it is softer, somehow. All he has to do is stare into the snowy expanse and he remembers where he is at home.

Just a boy, a puck, and his game.

Jack stays late that night. The practice had gone alright, at first, but he’d forgotten to take his meds and it became only more obvious as the night wore on, anxiety gnawing at him like a shark as he tried to choke it down. He’d missed shots, let himself get checked because he spent too long staring at the ice trying to quell the beast. In the end Coach had benched him and he’d curled into the side of the boards, knees touching his chin, closing his eyes against the noise and the shouting waves of the rink and doing his best to breathe.

Everyone else eventually heads out, and the noise fades a little bit. He needs to get home, get his meds in him. But he drove tonight, which was stupid, and his phone is dead, even stupider, so he can’t call an Uber, and-

He breathes, slowly, like his therapist told him to, picks up his skates and gets back on the ice.

It’s an old strategy, from back in the day when he didn’t know he could get rid of this any other way. He does laps at first, staring into the blank expanse until it clears him of the jitter that sits in the nerves of his wrist. He takes a couple loose shots at the net. Only a handful find home, but it’s not the point.

Jack finally feels stable enough to at least drive without losing it, and the rest, well, he’ll deal when he gets home. He undoes his skates straight on the ice, letting his feet drop to the cold, letting the blankness bleed through them.

He grabs his skates and swings them over his shoulder, going to leave. On a whim he scans the stands and sees it again- that dumb kid is still here, the one who’s been frequenting their practices the past few days. He’s fallen asleep in the stands.

Jack hops the wall out of the bench area and walks up the stairs towards him. He knows a handful of things about the current Falconers shadow- he’s on the young side, probably early twenties. He wears the same worn purple hoodie every time he shows up. He spends most of his time on his laptop, not paying a whole lot of attention to the game. Jack can guess the type- student reporter from the local community college, pushed on an assignment he doesn’t care for, let in by Coach out of pity. The last shadow of theirs did the same.

He gently shakes his shoulder and the kid jolts awake, wide-eyed, scrambling for his laptop where it’s fallen down between seats in front of him.

“Ohmygosh, I’m so sorry” he babbles, in one of the thickest Southern accents Jack has ever heard. “Didn’t mean to keep you-”

He grabs his laptop and swivels to look at Jack, overgrown hair pushing into his eyes. “Oh.” the kid says. “Um. Thought you were a janitor.”

“They’re still here too.” Jack notes. They’re the reason he’s trying to get out of here now and not stay another hour until he’s back on his game. It’s already late, he’s not the kind of asshole his teammates can be.

The kid nods and gets to his feet. Jack leans over, grabbing the papers that had flown when he dived for his laptop. On a better day, he’d pretend to be interested in what this kid was doing, what teacher had brought him here.

He wasn’t feeling talking tonight, though.

“I’ll walk you out.” he says and slings his hockey bag over his shoulder. The kid nods, still thunderstruck, but he stays quiet all the way out to the car.

It’s a little blessing.

————

The Craigslist ad had been pretty explicit about it wanted; LOOKING FOR A THIRD PERSON TO SHARE A LEASE IN PROVIDENCE, RI. MUST BE CHILL WITH NAKEDNESS, WEED, AND LOTS OF PAINT. I DON’T GIVE A FUCK OTHERWISE. SHIT, BE A FUCKING WIZARD.

Well, that Eric could deliver on.

He packs up and starts on a goodwill pie for the elderly grandmother whose couch he’s been crashing on. Mama June is ninety-five, blind, and the sweetest person he’s ever stayed with. She doesn’t seem to question how fast his pies appear, only that they do, and she’s grateful for such a nice young man to cook her food and feed her cat.

He’s careful to bake a lot of love into that pie, as much caring and calm as he can push into the crust. He leaves it in the oven instead of cooking it the usual way- slower, but she’ll smell it when she wakes up- and instructs her cat to watch the rats in the back shed.

The cat is annoyed he even asks but resignedly says he’ll try.

He catches a ride from Arizona to Rhode Island with a couple of college kids on their way back from Christmas vacation in a too-small minivan. Eric sleeps in the trunk and manages to whip up a box of cookies from what they’ve got in the cooler. It’s a bit tight- he’s never had to transmute soy milk into butter before- but it works. He’s pretty sure Grandma would be disappointed in him if he couldn’t figure out how to make trunk cookies.

So he manages to get to Rhode Island and he rolls up to the door of the saddest looking brownstone he’s ever seen. The door has several pink-and-yellow paper stubs taped to it. It looks like it was a crack house or a frat dump in another life.

His new housemates have left a key under the front mat, as promised. The house is dead empty. It reeks of old weed and lead paint. Someone has left most of their clothes in a messy pile at the kitchen table.

Eric leaves his bag on the table and walks carefully around the house with his eyes closed, measuring steps. He inhales deep, pushing past the surface junk and pulling for the older- the remnants of somebody’s floral candles, a couple of wet dogs, a bright wood fire in the living room, spilled hair dye, cracked tubes of aloe. Eric curls up on to his tiptoes, the floorboards creaking under him, and pulls for the color behind his closed eyelids. The colors slide into focus as he opens his eyes again, like bad filters on a picture that he can still see the edges of, slides of purple and gold sitting over chairs and lamps and curtains. His chest fills with a kind of soft, steady warmth as he spreads his senses around the house. The compassion here is so strong it pushes against chest; chaos purrs like a cat against his ankles, creativity and exhaustion are birds chasing each other in the attic.

Yeah, Eric likes this house.

He tips back down on to the flat of his feet and lets go, the colors slipping back to their natural state. Behind him, the front door clicks open.

“Goddamn, it smells like my aunt’s at Christmas.” says the taller of his new housemates, arms full of groceries. “This is fantastic.”

“Hello?” calls out the other, and Eric walks out of the living room and waves.

“Shit, son.” The taller one starts dumping his bags on the table. “If you do this to my house you can stay forever.” He pulls off his baseball cap, shaking out his rather magnificent mane, and holds out a hand. “I’m Shitty. You’re Eric, right?”

“Yeah, hi.” Eric shakes his hand. He’d forgotten he projected when he was checking auras sometimes. Whatever.

The girl introduces herself as Lardo and disappears upstairs to some art project she’s been working on. Eric helps Shitty with the groceries and tries to contain the disgust. It’s mostly Sriracha and frozen waffles. There’s milk, at the least, but it’s probably only there because of the three boxes of Lucky Charms.

Shitty disappears to do something and Eric stares at the kitchen in horror.

It’s not great. He has zero ingredients and this stove hasn’t been serviced in about ten years.

Calm. He closes his eyes again and reaches out for the house, pulling the warmth of it into him. He can work with this. He’s got milk, and he can make butter out of that easy. Eggos are, at their base, wheat anyways, and he hasn’t broken down anything in a couple months but they’re cheap enough that it should be easy. The only problem is he has no fucking fruit.

Eric opens the window in the kitchen and lays down a row of sunflower seeds scavenged from the pantry. He arranges them carefully into words- need apples, will pay in pie.

Shitty walks down twenty minutes later to his kitchen abuzz. Eric has a bowl stirring itself as he stares intently at a frozen waffle in his hands, slowly dissolving it into piles of flour and sugar with intermittent sparks of gold. On the windowsill sits a rather perturbed looking raven munching on sunflower seeds, a bag of apples sitting below it in the sink. The whole place smells like- god, he doesn’t know. It’s what he always imagined the Weasley’s must be like, way more homey than his craphole of a house should ever be.

“Goddamn.” he says, and takes a seat at the kitchen table. “When I said I didn’t mind a witch, I didn’t realize Snow White himself was going to descend on us.”

“It’s nothing.” Eric says, distracted. The raven caws and makes a pass at the sugar pile, and Eric bats it away with the back of hand. “Wait,” he says sternly. “I promised you pie.”

“So what is there to do around here?” he asks Shitty. “I’m not really from the Northeast.”

“Yeah, I can tell. You’re gonna love it. There’s this farmer’s market down a few blocks on weekends, couple of hipster coffee joints. And some damn good hockey, if that’s your thing.” Shitty makes half an attempt at kicking the dirty laundry under the table, as if Eric hasn’t already seen it.

“We don’t really have hockey where I’m from. Is it interesting?”

“Like figure skating meets a cage fight. I fucking love it. They’re in regular season games right now, but tickets are expensive as hell. It’s fucking ridiculous. You can’t live on this side of town and afford that shit. If they wanted all their fans to go they’d drop the prices-” Shitty stops to take a breath and steal a pinch of sugar out of Bitty’s pile. “If you’re still interested, I bet you could sneak into practice pretty easy.”

Bitty finishes separating the Eggos and reaches for the apple bag. Shitty’s the reason he already starts to feel welcome here, even when it’s been thirty minutes. He’d been a little concerned that he’d been joking about the wizard thing, but when he started texting him to seal the deal, and found out he wasn’t going to be reduced to an urban legend, well, it was different. And stress-relieving.

—————

He goes to a couple practices. He shifts the coaches’ gaze whenever they check the stands. It’s intriguing, if he is a bit confused.

Then he falls asleep by accident- he’d been reading up on new baking spells, and the practice had gone long and finally everything had just started blurring together- and finds himself getting woken up by the prettiest boy he has ever seen in his life. The prettiest boy in all of Rhode Island walks him to his car.

He almost swoons a little.

Focus, Eric, you have work tomorrow. He’d already stayed later than he wanted to. Yeah, that face and that accent- but he was a hockey player, and with looks like that, he was undoubtedly straight and bouncing between girlfriends. There was no point in getting his hopes up.

————-

So. Back to this work thing.

Contrary to popular belief, Eric Bittle is not a human disaster. He manages to keep a decent wardrobe, he’s been taking college classes online, and he actually knows more than three people, all without a permanent address for the last two years. He likes to say he does have his life together, thank you very much, despite the fact that he’s just moved into a former and possibly still current crack house. As soon as he and Shitty had sealed the deal, he’d hit every witch forum he knew looking for a new job. He’s responsible, dammit.

He’d found a small potions shop nestled in the outlet strip on the richer side of Providence. To the passerby it was an empty store with a Coming Soon! sign hanging cheerily in the window. Inside, it was remarkably well lit and open. Eric likes that; he’s met too many witches who kept dark shops for the history of it.

The owner, Derek Nurse- or Nursey, as he insisted- is a good two years younger than him. Eric is stunned he’s even eighteen. He has money, and hates it. He sells everything lower than is sensible and pays Eric more than he should. He has a charmed weed patch in the back of the store.

Nursey is busy when he walks in the back, sleeves rolled up as he cuts up a unusually iridescent fish. Eric knows about as much about his family as Nursey knows about his- they both have reputations that neither of them give a real damn about. He’d heard plenty of trash talk from Mama about how the Nurses thought themselves better than everyone else because they were alchemists and therefore real witches. He’s sure it went the other way- the Bittles considered baking real magic instead of a side hobby, how dare they.

“Hey.” says Nursey with an acknowledging nod, and waves a scale-covered hand at him. “We’re gonna be fucking busy today, I’m just warning you.”

“Why?” Eric asks, baffled. It’s just a Wednesday.

“Hockey game tonight.” Nursey replies. He tosses a fin at Eric, who catches it cleanly and walks towards the pan on the stove. Nursey’s got a few things in their already: blackberries, toad eggs,and a half a bottle of aspirin. It’s the tried and true Nursey Hangover Cure.

Eric stirs it absentmindedly. “And this is for winning or losing?”

“Both. We’ll probably win, though, The Oilers suck.” Nursey says. “You wanna get a batch of cookies going? We’re gonna end up with a bunch of kids with noise sensitivity.”

“Gotcha.” Eric walks over to the fridge. “What else should I expect?”

“Pregaming adults, old people with shitty eyesight, anybody who was dumb enough to bet.” Nursey says. He adds the rest of the fish to his saucepan, waving off the cloud of green smoke it creates. “Hockey’s a fucking religion around here, man.”

“I’ve noticed.” He’s hoping he can make it to a game soon, but Shitty was not joking about the expense. “We’re gonna put it on, right?”

“Only reason I bought a TV for the lobby.” Nursey says. His phone rings in his pocket. He wipes the fishiness off on his jeans and checks the text. His shoulders drop back with a sigh.

“What?”

“Regulars being dumbasses. Open the freezer for me.”

Eric reaches up on his tiptoes to get it. Nursey shoulders past him, digging through piles and piles of tupperware. His phone goes off again.

“Get this for me, I gotta watch the stove.” he says, handing Eric a sandwich box with a thin layer of frost on the top. “They’re gonna come around back. Don’t act surprised and don’t ask any questions.”

“Ok?” Eric’s eyebrows ascend to his hairline, but Nursey doesn’t give any further explanation. A few minutes pass and there’s a knock at the back door.

Eric looks to Nursey, but gets nothing, so he walks out back.

Jack Zimmermann is leaning up against their dumpster, dressed so well he looks like he belongs on the cover of GQ and not the alleyway of an outlet mall. He’s not looking at the door. He’s playing with his tie instead, threading it through his fingers. Eric gasps, eating the back of his hand to stifle it. After last night he’d gone home and googled the ever-loving fuck out of this guy. He hadn’t seemed the type to even know about this place.

“Um.” Eric says, and Jack looks up. His head snaps back for a minute as he recognizes Eric.

“Oh. It’s you.” he says. He shoves his hands deep in his pockets and stuffs an indeterminable amount of cash into Eric’s hands. He doesn’t say anything else, but he can’t make eye contact. Before Eric can process this- any of it- he’s grabbed the container and disappeared.

Eric walks back in and closes the door slowly, stunned. “I wasn’t aware we were doping hockey players.”

“I’m not doping him.” Nursey snaps. It throws Eric, hard. The only time he’s ever heard Nursey get angry before was at a belligerent customer. “It’s none of your business. But trust me, the greatest ass in all of hockey is not because of drugs. Get back to your cookies.”

———-

(The Falconers win, as predicted. They sell out of their hangover cure. Nursey hotboxes the store to celebrate.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> umm ok. so that's a lot of comments to wake up to. have i mentioned i love this fandom? y'all are so supportive.  
> already had this chapter drafted so i threw it through the edit machine for your enjoyment.  
> as always, feel free to hmu @bittermans to get off my ass and work on this.

 

Eric learns a few things about his new housemates:  

  * Shitty’s family has a lot of witches (although he isn’t one himself) and he lost his first name to a jinx by an angry uncle;
  * The previous inhabitant of Eric’s room had lived there very peacefully for the better part of two years before suddenly up and leaving one day citing “narrative reasons”, whatever that meant;
  * The neighborhood ravens will do his grocery, help with oven repairs, and even hang his laundry (the dryer broke two years ago) for pie;
  * Lardo is always in the attic because she is working on The Art Project and should only be disturbed in case of fire or similar catastrophe;
  * Shitty is terrified of spiders and makes Eric or Lardo kill them;
  * The house is definitely, absolutely haunted.



On a lazy night in late December he stares at the ceiling and listens to the pipes angrily beating around the attic. He finds a vaguely threatening message in his bathroom mirror- if _cute butt_ can be counted as vaguely threatening- the next morning. Shitty runs out of his bathroom with a hand towel positioned carelessly over his dick and yells at the attic for turning off his fucking hot water.

Eric’s used to ghosts. He had a few in the house back at Madison, and Mama June’s husband had liked to give her cat a good spooking. He scribbles a _thanks_ into the bathroom mirror and makes a note to crawl into the attic later to charm the pipes into working right.

Lardo, on the other hand, has a little less patience.

She tries, she really does. When she and Shitty had first moved in two years ago, she’d thought them kind of cool. Having a haunted house was legendary levels of bragging rights.

But now she’s at the end of her fucking rope.

She appears from the attic in a rage, tearing open the kitchen drawers Eric had been so careful to organize.

“What are you-”

“I’m fucking tired of those fucking ghosts in the attic.” she says, ripping out every container of salt she can find and a pepper for good measure. She goes for the next drawer over and starts pulling out the small collection of candles Eric’s been developing. “They fucked up that paint that took me a half an hour to mix. What do you even use on ghosts? Silver? Seances? Shit, I don’t know, but I want them gone.” This isn’t just hot water or their tv signal or the power on the blender, this is _another_ art project jinxed. This is her baby. Lardo is ready for murder.

“Not Yankee Candle.” Eric says. He lightly taps Lardo away by the shoulder and starts replacing some of the shit she’s dragged out. “And I’m not good enough to get rid of them, but I could call them up for a nice chitchat.”

“If I get a chance to tell a ghost to go fuck itself, then you’ll make my fucking day.” Lardo grumbles. “What do you need?”

“Go get my backpack from my room.” Lardo turns, flips off the ceiling, and walks up the stairs to his room.

Eric sets his candles back into neat rows, shaking his head with a _tsk._ “Holding seances with Pumpkin Spice? Bless her heart.”

Shitty follows Lardo when she comes back downstairs, half-dressed and mildly interested in the proceedings.

“I’ve always wondered who the house ghosts are.” he says.

“You have theories?” Eric asks, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He turns on the flashlight and stares up at the attic hatch, wondering how Lardo, who’s a good five inches shorter than him, manages to get up here all the time.

“More than just theories. We’ve tried to hold seances. Never summoned anything past a cracked mirror.” says Shitty with a shrug.

“What were you using?” Eric asks.

“I don’t know, a couple of tealights and a Ouija board?” Eric side-eyes Shitty strong. “Look man, we were high. Shit happens.”

Lardo grabs a broom she has leaned against the far wall and pushes on the attic hatch until it opens. “This house is fucking old. Been here since the sixties. It was a frat house for a community college for about twenty years, and then the owners rented it out to anybody they could.”

“Seven different people have died here.” Shitty says. “Personally I think it’s that alcoholic aunt.”

“Nah, she’d leave us alone when we’re trying to drink. It’s gotta be a frat kid.” Lardo hands Eric his backpack and climbs up first, phone between her teeth. “Hey assholes!” she shouts, muffled. There’s a faint crashing sound.

Eric climbs up after her. Lardo is picking glass shards out of her smock pile- the ghosts have knocked over her beer- and cursing into the darkness.

His light flashes briefly over her painting. Eric catches only a glimpse, but it’s beautiful- fractured planes of pinks and peaches, tight panes of cut glass fitting over the finished portions. Then he realizes he probably shouldn’t be looking and moves his light away.

Lardo doesn’t notice. She fishes blindly in the rafters for the switch. “Should I get the light?”

“Don’t bother,” says Eric, “it’ll go out anyways.”

He sits down in a clear spot in the insulation, unzipping his backpack. Out comes five slim, bone-white candles, an industrial size container of kosher salt, and a box of matches with purple heads. He hands Lardo the salt.

“Could you give me a circle big enough for the three of us?” Eric asks. “I don’t think our spirits are malevolent, but I’d rather be overcautious.”

He uses his fingers to gnaw little settingholes for the candles in the insulation while Lardo pours the salt ring. Shitty walks into the circle and Eric grabs his matchbox. They ignite with a soft _poof_ and a neat gold flame, one that seems to suck all of the light out of the room. As predicted, as soon as he lights the last candle, Lardo’s phonelight goes out.

“So what now?” Shitty asks. “Do we break out the chants? Do a little song and dance?”

“No, just- just let me.” Eric says. He closes his eyes and pushes for the color beyond them again. The house purrs a little as he connects into it.

He stiffens his spine and sifts through barrage of sensory material, looking for something off. It smells less like old weed and more like pie now, but the same sweet current of homeyness sits there. He feels huge, holding the whole of the house in his head like a marble in his jaw.

Eric clenches his hands and focuses on the attic around him. _You don’t have to be sitting here_ , he reminds himself. There are rules to the body but no rules to the aural plane.

He tugs out of his body like a butterfly out of a cocoon, kicking at the resistant strings of his thoughts as he does it. There is a bitterness in the back of his throat now, an irony tang that meanders around the room. He starts to walk at first, then remembers he doesn’t have to. He floats, toes skimming the floor.

Eric takes a wide circle around the attic, bouncing off the shards of purple and gold that fit uncannily around the edges. Lardo’s art project takes up a relatively small section of it. There are so many left-behinds from previous owners. An old basketball on the floor, a trunk of someone’s good linens, a box full of paperwork; there are memories tugging at him from all of them. Maybe even faded ghosts, if he tugged hard at it. But any ghosts connected to these left-behinds wouldn’t be strong enough to be Lardo’s. They’re too long forgotten.

He floats instead to a stack of boxes in the back corner. Eric opens the top one carefully. He feels...cold, now, and the box is icy to the touch. The top item in it is a orange-and-white evidence bag, and more, deeper; yes, this is it. This is the thread.

Eric reaches out into the house and tugs on the edge. Across the room, Shitty shrieks and jumps beside him. He’s done his job, although he can’t see it on this plane.

Eric slowly crawls back into his body and opens his eyes.

The ghosts- there are two of them- float about an inch off the floor just past the salt ring. They stare at the floor instead of their summoner.

“Yikes, bro.” the first ghost says. He’s young, about their age, black and muscular. “Can I just say- Miss Artist, I am so sorry-”  

Eric notes the dark spots- two on the sternum of the first, one on the chest of the second- and is quietly thankful they died clean. His first attempt at a seance with some of his high school friends had summoned a ghost who had died of a shotgun blast to the head. It hadn’t been pretty.

“We weren’t trying to fuck your shit up, I promise-” says the second.

The two talk over each other, glowing softly in the darkness of the attic. Eric has to bite his lip to keep from laughing. Lardo’s annoyed expression slowly morphs into one of exasperated amusement.

“Fine. You’re forgiven.” she grumbles. “Go back to the grave or whatever.”

“Hang on. Wait.” says the first ghost. “We have questions.”

“You. Have questions.” Shitty says slowly.

“Yeah. I’m Holster,” says the second, “that’s Ransom and we really need to know who won the cup this year.”

“You left the TV off!” shouts Ransom. “We didn’t see a single game!”

“You animals! Where were you even watching it?”

“And don’t tell me you weren’t, cause I won’t believe that for a fucking second.”

“Hockey ghosts.” Eric laughs. “I can’t escape it.”

“Greatest game on earth. And we’ve only been dead for like five years. It’s not _that_ weird.” Holster says.

“I’ll leave the TV on from now on if you give me my hot water back. Deal?” says Shitty.

“DEAL.” they both yell.

“And the Habs won. 3-1 in Game Seven.” Shitty adds.

“Damn. Did the Falconers even make it to the playoffs?” Ransom asks.

“Yeah, but they got kicked out in the first round.”

Holster tilts his head back in a mock scream. “Honestly! Get it together!”

“Don’t lose hope, bruh. They’ve got a new forward. And he’s like God’s gift to hockey, he’s one of the best players I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh thank god.” Ransom tries to walk- float?- closer and meets the edge of the salt circle with a frown. Eric leans over and scratches it out.

“Thank _God,”_ Shitty hisses, and walks out to stretch his legs. “Yeah, yeah. And get this. It’s _Jack Zimmerman.”_

“Whaaat.” says Holster, stunned.  “Jackie? Holy shit!”

That catches Eric’s attention. “You knew him?”

“Yeah, we played juniors together. I mean- we died before, y’know- anyways, we go back. ”

Eric does not know what they’re referencing, but he chalks it up to his very limited range of hockey knowledge.

He leans over and realizes his candles are growing short. “It’s in the back, right?” He’d sensed the chill of their anchor earlier. As of right now, they could get around the house, but it might be handy to have the anchor in case he wanted some more portable ghosts.

“Mhmm. You’re looking for a .45 in an evidence bag. Last guy to live here was the investigating detective.”

“Gotcha.” Eric gets to his feet and walks towards the towering stack of personals. “I’ve got some birds in the kitchen y’all can possess if you want to keep talking hockey.”

“Literal chirping. Great plan.” Holster says, before the candles go out and he fades away. Eric doesn’t get the joke, but Shitty and Lardo obviously find it hilarious.

—————-

The kid misses a handful of practices.

Jack keeps playing that scene in the alley on repeat, his brain coming up with even worse variations on a theme every time. _What does he think I was doing? Does he think Nursey has me on something? Is he just embarrassed to run into me like that? Is he scared I’m gonna tell his secrets to somebody?_

He didn’t know how to explain the truth, how he’d realized he’d forgotten to take his meds twenty minutes before a press conference started and had no time to get back to his apartment. How this was so far from being the first time it had happened that Nursey kept his little substitute on hand. Fuck, this kid doesn’t need Jack’s can of worms opened on him. They’ve only ever talked twice.

Then, in January, he reappears with a new seat (closer to the bench) and a new jacket (still purple, less abused).  Jack only notices because he seems to be watching the game instead of on his laptop this time. It’s a fleeting thought; and then the hockey resumes, and Jack clicks back into his spot. They’re starting up a scrimmage today (not on the calendar, but the vets were getting sick of running drills).

He lets himself get lost in the calming routine of it. He took his meds this morning, the traffic was easy; today is going well. The ice welcomes him in like an old friend. His skates slide against it without the usual angry crack, pushing soft little slits into the ice. Jack stares into the white until colors start to dance around the edges of his vision. He catches a handful of passes in his peripherals.

He looks for the kid again when they break for water. He’s sitting forward in his seat, elbows on knees, his jacket billowed around his neck. Every once in a while he’ll say something, but Jack can’t figure out who he’s talking to until the head of what looks like a small bird pokes out of his pooled jacket.

Jack laughs to himself. This kid did seem like the type to adopt random abandoned animals. It was kind of cute.

Snowy catches him staring and pulls him back into the scrimmage. They fool around for a bit, testing how far behind him Snowy can pass and have Jack still catch it. Jack pulls off a near straightline pass- he doesn’t even turn to look- and Snowy crows.

“Man, Zimmboni, you were worth the wait.” he says, clapping Jack on the shoulder. It takes Jack a second to realize this is supposed to funny. He laughs.

———-

“Alright, out of my jacket.” Eric commands. He’s in his car (Shitty’s, borrowed, improved a little by him), heat cranked up so high it fogs the windows over.

Holster gives a little chirp and jumps out of the fold he’d been sitting in. Ransom, who’s inhabited a towhee a little too big to fit in Eric’s jacket, crawls out of his backpack. They sit on together on the dashboard, Holster bouncing and fluttering his wings out.

“Ok, fuck the pipes, this is way more fun.” he says. “We need to possess animals more often.”

“Next dog I see, I’m jumping in.” says Ransom.

Eric hums nervously and looks around the parking lot. “I wish y’all had been killed by something less illegal. I don’t want to get caught with a gun in my bag.”

“You took out the clip, right?” says Holster.

“Yeah, I still don’t like it.”

“Understandable. We’ll try to die more conveniently next time.”

Eric frowns and leans forward to ruffle Holster’s head. Holster squawks, mock-offended, but lets him do it anyways.

“Feeling educated?” asks Ransom.

“Sort of.” says Eric. “I get checking and the power play thing now. But why do they keep calling each other those dumbass names?”

Ransom swivels his head. “Hockey nicknames? They’re just a thing. Cause you’re like, tighter than family, but in a _no homo_ way? IDK. Hockey can be simultaneously the gayest and the most homophobic thing on the planet sometimes.”

“You just take a bit of your name, smash it into an ending, boom, you’re done.” says Holster. “Ransom’s last name is Oluransi. We started with Ransy, then one of our teammates turned it into Ransom. Larissa gets turned into Lardo, Birkholtz into Holster-”

“-Alexei Mashkov is inexplicably Tater-”

“-Jack is somehow not Dreamboy-”

“-anyways, we should give you one.” says Ransom. He bobs forwards and looks at Eric. “Hmm. You’re the tiniest witch I’ve ever met, for one.”

“You’ve met a lot?”

“I mean, we played hockey, we’ve met a few.” Holster says. “That’s a shitty sample size though. All hockeywitches are massive. You’re just an itty bitty-”

He and Ransom turn to each other, wings spread wide. “Bitty!”

Eric laughs and presses his fingers out on his chin. There’s a knock on his window and he jumps, hitting his head against the roof.

“Shit.” he hisses, and rolls the window down. Jack Zimmerman- _Jack fucking Zimmerman_ \- is leaned over by his car, because his massive body is a bit too tall for Eric’s tiny sedan. He breathes little ice clouds into the freezing Rhode Island night, and Eric laments the loss of heat from his car.

“Um.” Jack says. “Sorry. Didn’t realize-”

“Oh. Hi-” Eric stumbles.

“I just- I just wanted to ask if you were ok, you’ve been sitting in your car for like an hour- I mean, I saw you leave a while ago, and then I went to leave-”

Eric, for a brief moment, is floored by the growing pile of evidence that one of the best recruits of all time is actually an awkward dork. “Thanks for worrying but I’m-I’m fine.” He laughs uncomfortably. “Man, we keep meeting, it’s like magic.”

He says it without thinking about it. Eric’s brain is a solid minute behind him now. Jack’s face has that effect on him. And also his ass. But mostly his face.

Jack starts laughing. Not hard; it’s a reserved, thoughtful chuckle, like he’s acknowledging Eric’s accidental joke in the most polite way possible. Eric sinks back in his seat under the weight of his own stupidity.

“Anyways. Hi. I’m Eric.” he says. He can feel his face going red.

“Jack,” and Eric knew that already, but he thinks about how little this guy probably gets to actually introduce himself and lets him have it. “You new in town?”

“Yeah, sort of.” If they’re going to actually have a conversation- and Jesus, that’s a concept- he could at least invite him out of the cold. “Do you wanna get in? My heat’s functioning.”

“Eh. I’m not a peach masquerading as a human being. A little frost never killed anyone.”

“Sorry. Are you speaking to me right now?”

“Huh?”

“Cause I’m not sure Canada is real. Y’know, most people on this planet see that it’s fifteen degrees out, they go inside, turn the heat on. They don’t wander out into the middle of a snowed over parking lot wearing short sleeves.”

“Unsurprising that you’re intimidated by a pile of _fluffy ice.”_

“You are some kind of Canadian unicorn and I don’t understand you. Go back to your fictional country.”

Jack laughs again. Eric decides he’ll kill a man for that sound.

Holster chirps from the dashboard.

“What the fuck-” Jack leans in and stares deeper into the car. “Is that- is that a bird?”

“Oh yeah- that? Long story. There was this-” he starts, and then Ransom pecks him hard in the foot. “-anyways,” he says, biting back a string of swear words that would leave his grandmother angry at him, “I’ll tell you later.”

Implying that there will be a later, and this won’t be the only awkward conversation they have.

“Oh. Ok. Well.” Jack stands up, his hands shoved firmly in his pockets. “Have a good night.”

Eric rolls the window back up and watches Jack walk away, listening to the pound of his heart in his ears.

“Damn.” whistles Holster, hopping on to Eric’s shoulder. “Puberty hit him like a truck. That’s a fine piece of ass.”

“Still an awkward little puppy, though.” says Ransom, without confidence. “That’s- wow, it’s weird seeing him again. We’re right here. He has no idea.”

“Yeah.” Holster drops his head.

“Sorry for almost talking about you guys.” Eric stammers. “I didn’t think-”

“s’okay, Bitty.” says Ransom.

“Hey.” says Eric. He feels scared to bring this up. “Could I- could I ask-”

He tightens his fingers along the steering wheel. “I mean, I looked him up. Why he signed so late. And I just- you guys knew him- was it really-”

Ransom and Holster exchange a glance.

“We were kind of busy being dead when he od’ed.” Ransom says slowly. “And even if we knew all the details, I’m not sure it’s our place to tell you that. But I will say this: never, ever trust anyone on ESPN or NBC. They’ve always forgotten the fact that Jack’s a human being, not some kind of hockey robot.”

“Can we go home and watch Game 2? I’m tired of possessing this bird.” asks Holster, stopping the conversation. They’ve been going through every Stanley Cup they’ve missed the past five years and angrily calling out refs via pipe rattling.

“Yeah, sure.” says Eric.

He puts his foot on the gas and drives.

  



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so! a couple of things!  
> you'll notice there is no longer a question mark after chapters. after the outpouring of support i got after the last chapter i got off my ass and wrote an actual outline and shit. but seriously Y'ALL. HOLY SHIT.  
> YOU BROKE MY KUDOS RECORD. and my comments record, and pretty much everything else. i've had that record FOR THREE YEARS.  
> this community continues to blow me away with their support and is definitely keeping me motivated to keep at this. <3 you all to bits.  
> also real talk: i'm from georgia and i'm probably butchering new england. apologies in advance. (maybe that's why i like writing bitty? who knows.)

Eric wakes up early on a Tuesday for no reason whatsoever.

He stares at the ceiling for a few minutes, trying to rationalize going back to bed. The house is quiet, his bed is warm, and the outside isn’t. There. That’s a decent excuse.

The problem is that it’s six am, and he usually gets up at seven. The winter sun, although not yet risen, is threatening the sky with hasty orange brushstrokes. If he gets going now, he could have a batch of cookies going before Nursey gets to work and commandeers him for other things.

Responsibility sucks sometimes.

He gets out of bed slowly, one toe at a time, keeping his comforters bundled all the way over his head. Eric tentatively sets a foot on the wood floor and draws back. _Shit,_ that’s cold.

His options are tiptoeing across the floor or giving up and making a run for it. He opts for the second, shedding his blanket-coat and getting dressed so fast it has to be a record somewhere. Someone has to be keeping that record, right?

The heater in his car, by some miracle, has not yet broken. The car previously known as Shitty’s and now repossessed by Eric- because Shitty doesn’t go anywhere except work, and he can walk there- is approaching twelve years old. Bit by bit every part in it has broken. But not the heater. Because it understands against the face of the ferocious Rhode Island winter, it has no choice but to hang on.

Eric goes in the front door when gets to work. He doesn’t often go this way, but it’s still dark enough that he feels uncomfortable using the back alley. He turns the lights on before he even bothers to look inside.

“What the _FUCK_ turn those OFF-”

Eric doesn’t process who’s yelling or why. He just slams the light switch as fast as possible.

His eyes take a couple seconds to adjust, and his brain a few more after that. Nursey is leaned- or, more accurately, laid out- against one of the display cases, unconcerned with the fact he’s been caught making out with somebody in the store. The boyfriend (?) is a bit more than unconcerned. He’s pretty well pissed off.

“The fuck were you thinking?” he hisses. He presses a hand to his cheek and pulls it away with a soft _fuck._

“Oh! I’m so sorry, I didn’t think anyone was in here-” Well. This is awkward.

“Dex, chill, he didn’t know.” says Nursey, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “You burned bad?”

“I’ll live,” says Dex, but he still looks at Eric like he’s plotting his murder. Eric wants to crawl into the nearest hole and stay there for a few centuries.

“Is it still dark out?” Dex asks.

Eric nods.

Dex grabs his hat off an adjacent counter. “Alright, I gotta go.” He shoulders past Eric and out the door without making eye contact again.

“Sorry.” Nursey says. He pushes himself off the counter and readjusts his apron. “You can turn the lights on again.”

Eric does so, and tries to refocus on what he came here for. Cookies. Not his boss's vampire boyfriend.

“Sorry about hurting him.” he says.

“Don’t stress about it. The lights were on for half a second. Dex is just a big baby. And I would have warned you, but,” Nursey shrugs. “He got here around two to help me with inventory, and, ah, shit happened.”

“I can see.” Eric says. _Cookies._ “I’ll just text you before I come in early next time.”

“Sounds good.” says Nursey. He drops into a squat and starts replacing all the bottles he’s knocked over.

Eric walks into the back and turns the oven on. He focuses on his baking instead of whatever _that_ was. They’ve got a big order due later this afternoon for a nursing home uptown. Nursey had just thrown the phone at Eric when it was called in.

At noon they switch out, and Eric takes register. He helps an older couple find something to cheer up their grandkids who live three states away. He drives off the small herd of underage stoners who seem to spend their days frequenting the outlet mall and nothing else. They’re in here every day, never buying anything, just using it as a spot to steal wifi and warm up. He wouldn’t mind if they weren’t stealing pies he left out to cool- and attracting a couple of undercover cops.

After that small fiasco, Eric sidles back behind the counter and checks his phone. He slides through a couple of texts from Shitty when the bell to the front door rings. He looks up right as Jack walks in.

“Oh, hi.” says Jack. “Thought I’d come in the front door this time.”

It’s kind of weird to see him in anything other than a hockey jersey. His inhuman muscles are buried under a thick red flannel and a pair of certified Dad Jeans. He could just be another of the random flannel Canadians that peppered the streets in Providence.

“What are you doing here?” Eric asks. He dips his phone out of sight under the counter, half ready to text Shitty.

“One of my teammates was in here yesterday and couldn’t stop raving about how good your pie was. So I’d thought I’d try it out for myself.”

Eric runs a mental roster of everyone he’s seen in the past week. None of them struck a chord, but he doesn’t know the team’s faces too well. And if they’d walked in here dressed like Jack he wouldn’t have recognized them.

He decides against notifying his friends and tucks his phone in his apron. It’s empty in here now; most people have gone back to work.

“If you want to wait five minutes, I’ve got a fresh one in the oven. Blackberry and sunbeam, it’ll warm you right up.” he says.

“It’s kind of hot out there, actually. Got anything cold?” Jack’s joking, and Eric knows he’s joking, but he does have a good key lime in the freezer and it might just be worth the joke.

“Watch yourself, Jack, or I’ll turn you into a polar bear.”

It’s an uninspired chirp, but an effective one.

“Hmm. That’s not bad for an amateur. But you need to get better than repeating variations on your own jokes.”

Is Jack seriously going to stand here and analyze his _chirping game?_ Is this supposed to be flirting? He can’t tell.

“Fine.” Eric says. “And you need to get better than using the same backhand play every time you’re trying to win a faceoff.”

Jack stares him down, his face serious. “Really?”

“Well, not every time. But you do have a bad habit.” Eric says.

“Huh. I’ll remember that.” Jack leans back against the counter.  “I’ve been meaning to ask, why do you sit in on practices so much?”

“We don’t have hockey where I’m from. Just trying to indoctrinate myself into the local cult.”

“And where are you from?”

“Take a wild guess.”

“I would say the South, but I don’t know specific bits of America that well.”

Eric sighs. “I can’t tell if you’re fucking with me or not. I’m from Georgia, originally, but I’ve moved around a lot the past few years.”

“Have you ever actually been to a game?”

“What? No. Way too expensive.”

“Huh.” says Jack, thoughtful. “I’ll see if I can do something about that.”

The offhand mention of hockey influence reminds Eric who he’s chatting with; not his roommates, but an actual NHL player. Casual chirping is one thing, but this is the Falc’s star forward _._ He probably wants something if he’s offering to use his ticket powers, and it’s not to just walk in here and flirt. _Honestly, Eric, get your head out of the clouds._

“That’d be really nice of you.” he says quickly. In the back his timer goes off.  “Just give me a moment to go get that.”

“Hey, uh, before I forget, could I have your number?”

Eric freezes in his tracks. It takes everything in him to not turn around. There it is, his _reason,_ but why-

“It’s just, I know Nursey does have some days off, and I hate calling the store when I have to-” He hears Jack shuffling around nervously. “It’s ok if you don’t feel comfortable dealing with my shit.”

Eric takes a deep breath and turns around. “No, that’s fine!” he says, cheerily as he can.

“You’re sure you don’t-”

“Jack, you’re way too polite to be on anything that illegal. It’s fine.” He pulls a pen out of the basket on the counter and takes Jack’s hand. Eric tries not to think about how wide and rough his fingers are as he scribbles his number on the palm. “Just let me go get my pie, ok?”

“Yeah, thanks.” says Jack.

—————

He’s going to get in his car when his phone buzzes.

_This is Jack. Just making sure you have my number._

Eric shakes his head and beams. He analyzes the perfect capitalization, the full-stops, and finds himself shocked by none of it.

He goes to type a response, then stops himself. This is a little strange.  He’s trying to be friendly and well, _normal_ with a guy who’s more famous than he ever will be. Jack doesn’t seem to mind, but Jack has spent his life dealing with fans. It’s a reaction he must have on autopilot by now.

But-

Eric grew up in a small town. His mother had sold to or baked for almost everyone in a six-mile radius; his father had coached every little boy wanting to play football. He’d gotten used to getting recognized in the middle of Target. They’d usually catch his mother first, chat her up about something she was working on, and then they’d see him, no matter how hard he tried to become one with the cereal aisle. The questions were indistinguishable from one another. _How’s school going? Have you looked at where you’re going to college yet? Oh, that’s interesting. Has anyone ever told you you look just like your mother?_

And he’d adapted. Indulging them was like flipping a switch. He’d memorized his answers and repeated them ad infinitum.

Of this, he knows two things.

1\. Jack’s joking isn’t an autopilot. It _can’t_ be. It’s sure as hell not flirting either, but when Eric was on autopilot he never thought far enough to make a joke. He was so occupied with getting the interrogator out of his face that his brain couldn’t string one together.

2\. Jack deals with press all the time. And when it’s not the press, it’s the team, or his coaches. From what he knows of his family from the night he spent awkwardly skimming through wikipedia pages, they were famous back in the nineties.  Yeah, it’s not quite the same, he can’t conflate Jack’s press experience with his mother’s dogged following. At the time he would have killed to have someone ask him how his day was, or what he was interested in lately. Maybe Jack just wants a friend. Someone who doesn’t treat him like an interview subject. If that’s the case, fuck the crush. As much as he wants it, he’ll bury it for Jack’s good.

Fuck, this _sucks_.

Eric sits there and chews on all this for a few minutes before finishing his reply. _all good_ he fires back, adding a bird emoji for good measure. He wonders if Jack will get the joke, but there’s not exactly a good falcon emoji.

JZ: _What was that?_

EB: _?_

JZ: _It just came up as a black box with a question mark in it? Were you trying to send something?_

Eric stares at the ceiling of his car. This boy.

_when was the last time you updated your phone_

_I’m not sure, actually. I’ve had it a few years._

Jack probably has more money than God. Jack is apparently also still using a four year old phone. These things are not congruous in the slightest and yet they make perfect sense.

_next time i see u i’ll give you a lesson on modern technology_

_Funny._

He gets home and is assaulted by a pair of dogs the instant he steps out of his car.

A massive yellow lab sprints out of the garage and knocks him over in the driveway, nudging him over as he falls so he lands in the snow instead of the asphalt.

“Bitty!” Holster yells, wagging his tail. “We found dogs!”

“Dogs! They’re great!” Ransom pulls Eric’s hat off and covers his hair in ice. He’s a fucking _chihuahua_. “I’m staying a dog forever!’

“Dude, wanna go find a small animal to harass?”

“Hell yeah!”

Eric sits up, brushing the snow out of his hair while Holster bounds in circles around him. “Y’all are really excited about this.”

“You don’t understand. We had Lardo drag us all around town today.”

“We went to so many pet stores. _So many._ We had to get the perfect bodies.”

“Pet stores?” Eric absentmindedly pets Ransom’s head. He’s glad the guys don’t seem to find this weird at all. Cuddling dogs is just what he needs after a day of Jack giving him heart palpitations.

“Yeah. We like being solid. But I didn’t want to possess like, an actual person. Dogs are guilt free.”

“We got these out of an animal shelter, we swear.” Ransom is so little that most of his legs and his belly are covered in snow. He’s shaking from the cold. Eric, concerned, pulls him into his lap.

“Please tell me you didn’t make Lardo pay anything.” he says.

“Nope! They were last chance dogs.” says Holster.

“She did have to pay for a ridiculous amount of dog food though.”

“Only for you. I could just eat you when I get hungry.”

“You couldn’t catch me if you tried.” Ransom yaps, hiding behind Eric.

“It’s not even hard, you know? I could just open my mouth and you’d probably run in.”

“I chose a tiny dog for a reason.”

“Cause you’ve always known you’re shorter?”

“Because my tiny little paws can work a keyboard. Have fun figuring out Vine with those hooves.”

Holster growls and lunges at Ransom, who makes a sprint for it across the snow, kicking up a cloud of ice. Eric grabs his hat and stands up, trudging towards the front door. The house is boiling over, a stark contrast to the freezer it was this morning. Lardo is in the kitchen, wearing just a t-shirt and shorts and throwing her fourth empty coffee cup into the sink. She’s trying and failing to get paint off her hands.

“Work ok?” she asks.

“It was work. So. Solid five.” Eric takes his coat off and slings it over the back of a chair. “Did they really drag you around all day?”

He sits down and pulls his phone out of his pocket, checking his texts. He doesn’t expect to have anything, so he shouldn’t be disappointed when he doesn’t. In theory.

“Yeah. I don’t mind. I’m more of a cat person myself, but I got to pet a lot of cute animals, so it was overall a win.” Lardo dries her hands off and sits across the table from him. “Hey, astronaut.”

“Huh?” He sets his phone down.

“You’ve been on another planet lately.” she says. “Spill.”

Eric shifts in his seat, debating telling her.

Option A: he dodges it and Lardo says nothing about it.

Option B: he gives her a perfunctory amount of detail and gets the life advice without the ribbing.

Option C: he spills everything and never hears the end of his stupid crush.

He opts for B, because it’s the least likely to end in death by Lardo. “I got a guy’s number.”

“ _Nice._ ” She raises her hand and Eric attempts to reciprocate a high five. “But my spider-senses are telling me there’s something wrong with it. What, is he a creep? Cause I’m not above first-degree murder.”

“No, no, he’s really sweet. But it wasn’t like that. It was for a work thing. And it’s frustrating because he’s both adorable and miles out of my league. And probably straight.”

“Story of my life. The cute ones are always straight.”

“What’s the solution?”

“Moping and alcohol.”

Eric rests his head against the table. “Ugh.”

“Let’s just say he wasn’t, though, I mean, you can’t really assume.” Lardo leans back in her chair and swings her legs up on the table.

“I don’t know, my gaydar isn’t broadcasting at all.” Eric says into the wood.

“Gaydar is frequently wrong, as I’ve had proven to me on many occasions. How out of your league is this guy?”

“ _Very.”_

“Do I know him?”

“You probably know more about him than I do, but no, you don’t know him.”

Lardo stares at him like he’s a shark in the middle of Main Street. “Bitty, if you’re about to acquire a sugar daddy, I need you to promise me you’ll share.”

“ _Jesus.”_

“I have student loans to pay off! Art school is expensive!”

Eric doesn’t move.

Lardo frowns. “Look, all I can offer you is sympathy spooning and whatever the fuck Shitty made in my sink last night. I have no idea what’s in it, but it’s strong, so...”

“Yeah. Sounds great.” To hell with healthy coping strategies. He needs to get so drunk he forgets his name. That’ll bury it deep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so im still in love with this au

He is trying very, very hard not to have an existential crisis in the middle of frozen foods. 

Eric stares deeply into a pizza, ignoring Holster’s poking at his leg. Holster bats at him again, the velcro on his very carefully made replica of a guide dog vest scratching at Eric’s leg.

[A conversation, twenty-five minutes earlier: 

Shitty: you are aware-

Lardo: that fake guide dogs devalue real ones? Yes, we already had this argument. How else are we dragging dogs around everywhere.

Shitty: fair. 

(exit, followed by a chihuahua)]

Holster stares up at Eric, wagging his tail against his leg so hard Eric’s convinced it’ll bruise. 

“I’m not doing it.” Eric drops his voice, remembering that talking to animals is a thing most people don’t do. He doesn’t even turn to look at Holster. He watches him instead in the reflection of the frosted over glass. Maybe he should get some more ice cream for the fridge. 

Holster whines, his ears drooping low. 

“He’s just shopping. I’m not gonna bother him.” 

Holster throws his body against Eric, skidding his claws on the tile floor. A woman down the aisle turns to look at him. She doesn’t say anything, but she has the suburban mom guilt look on her face and he instantly feels bad. 

“Sorry, sorry.” he mutters, and tugs tight on Holster’s leash. 

“Asshole.” Holster barks. There’s a lot more he wants to say, but having an entire conversation with Eric in public is not feasible when you are inhabiting a dog. 

Eric rolls his eyes and clenches his fist around the leash. 

He sees Jack in the reflection of the glass first. Jack doesn’t so much as look at him.

“See? Told you. He doesn’t want to talk to me.” he says to Holster, moving his mouth as little as possible. 

“Do you always have animals on you?” Jack says. Holster wags his tail in pure glee. Eric goes through a list of curses that would have him doing the dishes for days. He’s having a hard time killing the crush when Jack insists on acting like he exists in a cookie cutter romance movie every time they run into each other. 

Across the aisle, Madam Suburbia is blatantly staring at them while texting up a storm. Eric accepts there’s going to be a picture of him on a gossip site by this afternoon. 

“Occupational hazard.” Eric replies. Holster pulls his leash out of Eric’s hand and starts sniffing at Jack’s shoes. Jack drops down to rub at Holster’s head, his eyes heavy and tired. Holster licks at his face, covering him with as much of his yellow fluff as he can. Jack flinches, falling back a little before regaining his balance. 

“You okay?” Eric asks. Jack stands back up slowly, keeping his hand buried in Holster’s head. 

“Practice was a little rough today.” he says. “I’ve had worse, though.” He smiles at Holster. “You have a cute dog.” he says. “What’s his name?”

“Adam.” 

“Nice.”

“At this point I think you’re just trying to run into me. You do know how to use your phone, right?” asks Eric, mock-serious. 

“Huh?”

“If you wanted to talk to me so badly, you could have just texted me instead of following me around town.” Bad Eric. Borderline flirting in public is on the list of things he agreed with himself he wouldn’t be doing. 

“I’m allowed to live in this town, aren’t I? It’s just coincidence.” Jack’s lip twitches into a smirk. “A little fate, eh?”

_ Lord,  _ this boy is gonna kill him. 

Madam Suburbia is still texting. He feels very vulnerable. Holster notices it too, and _maybe_ Eric relaxes his hold on his leash. He bounds over to her and starts sniffing at her cart. 

“Ugh, go away, mutt.” she says, putting down her phone and attempting to shoo Holster away. Holster responds by jumping at her, tail wagging furiously. 

She aims a kick at Holster and misses badly. “Control your dog,” she snaps at Eric, and then she grabs her cart and walks away. 

Holster calmly walks back over and sits down next to Eric. 

“Thanks, bud.” says Eric. 

Holster winks. 

Jack grins. “Can I steal him for my next press conference?”

“Jack, I don’t think the poor SI reporter wants my dog all over them.”

“You could train him to chase away paps! He’s a natural!” Jack leans up against the cooler.”Hey, so we’re playing the Aces on Tuesday. Think you can get off work?”

“I mentioned to Nursey I’d never been to a game on Friday. He threatened to put me in the sacrifice pile while I was still a hockey virgin. So yeah, I don’t think it’ll be a problem.” 

“Ok, good. I’m gonna be out of town this weekend, but I could probably show you around before the game-”

“Show me around? I thought you were just gonna get me tickets!’

“I just thought you’d like to see the stadium.” Jack doesn’t seem to be able to process that these are abnormal things for a person to do. 

“Yes, I would, but won’t you be busy?” 

“I’ll find time. Is it just gonna be you?”

He almost says yes, but then he thinks of Shitty and Lardo, who have watched every game this season from the couch. “I’ve got two friends- my roommates- if it’s not a problem for you, that is.”

“Not at all.” Jack says. “I’ll remember how my phone works when I get it taken care of, ok?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Jack nods and walks off. Eric resists the urge to clutch his heart. 

“You have a useless crush, don’t you?” asks Holster. 

Eric chews on his lip and doesn’t answer. 

“You can admit it. He’s cute. I used to have a thing for him.”

Eric sighs. “Why’d you give up?”

“Reasons.”

“Please remind me of that in a couple weeks.”

———————

“Ransom!” Holster yells when they get back to the house. “You and I are now Bitty’s fairy godparents.” 

Ransom is in the middle of a Shitty-Lardo cuddle pile on the couch, but he bounds up on the back when he hears Holster’s voice. Now that they’ve left the general population, Holster has forgotten he’s supposed to be a dog. His tail and ears have gone flat. 

“Cool. Do I get a wand? And who are they?”

Lardo shoves Shitty off her and sits up. “Hold up. Is this the boy? Did you run into him?”

“What boy?” asks Shitty, facefirst in the carpet. He makes no attempt to get up. 

“We ran into Jack when we were getting groceries and I think Bitty had a heart attack.” 

Lardo’s jaw drops. Shitty propels himself off the carpet. 

Eric makes a beeline for Holster. “Traitor!” 

Sidenote: dogs are faster than humans. 

“Bitty,” Lardo says slowly. “You told me had this boy’s number.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“You have  _ Jack Zimmermann’s  _ personal cell. And you know it works, right? You’ve checked that he didn’t just give you a fake one?” She chews on every word.

“Yeah, I texted him a couple times. But not like-”

He’s cut off by the pillow that hits him in the face. 

“You have got to be fucking me.” Shitty says. “You can’t be serious.”

“Look, I can prove it.” Eric goes for his phone. “And he’s a fucking dweeb.” 

“Where is my laptop.” Ransom growls. “Somebody grab me my laptop, I need to start a new spreadsheet.”

Shitty rolls over and opens it for him. “For?”

“We are getting Bitty this boy.” 

“ _ Please,  _ the house needs it.” says Shitty. “Start a second sheet with everything we need to replace.”

“Shits, that would just be a picture of the whole house.”

Eric buries his face in his hands, his face burning. “ _ Y’all.  _ Could we stop? It’s not like that.”

“You told me pretty explicitly yesterday that it was.” says Lardo. 

“I know, but I’m trying to-” He sinks into the empty armchair. “Lardo, I said I was trying to drop it. And it won’t matter, he’s probably straight.”

Ransom stops typing and turns to stare at Holster. They both turn to Eric in eerie sync. 

“Yeah, no.” Holster says. “I told you I gave up on him, right? It’s because he was dating one of the other juniors kids.”

“He was? Damn, I never heard that little tabloid.” Lardo perks her head up. 

“See, they might be still together-” Eric tries. 

“Nah, they ah, rather publicly hate each other now.” says Ransom. 

Lardo narrows her eyes. “Are you insinuating what I think you’re insinuating?”

“I didn’t say anything.” Ransom sits up straight. If a dog could whistle suspiciously, he’d be doing it. 

“Holy shit, that would be a twist. Proves your Jack’s type, too.”

“What, walking trainwreck?” Holster says. 

“Nah, adorable and blond.”

“You and I have very different opinions on this.”

Eric has no idea what they’re referencing. He closes his eyes, listening to them laugh as Ransom calls out entries for his spreadsheet. 

Maybe they’ll drop it in a few days. He could put up with a few days.

———————

Jack flies up to Montreal early the next morning. 

A couple days ago he’d had a conversation with his father that went something like this:

_ Dad: you haven’t been up in a while. want to come visit this weekend? _

_ JZ: I have a game on Tuesday.  _

_ Dad: don’t worry. already talked 2 ga and coach.  _

_ JZ: Dad, I need to practice.  _

_ Dad: some of my buddies are coming up too _

_ Dad: mario hasn’t seen you in forever  _

The problem is, he doesn’t want to go, but arguing with his father is an uphill battle. He hasn’t had the energy to climb that mountain for several years now. So he loses two days. It’s a relatively minor loss. 

Dad hooks him up with a private jet, at the least. He naps for the first half-hour or so, then spends the next twenty minutes staring blankly out the window. The clouds are too thick to see anything. They lie heavy and winter-white around him, a surrounding, muting blanket atop the plane. 

He pulls out his phone and notices they’re low enough to get a signal. He sends a quick  _ getting close  _ to his father, and then skims through the rest from last night. He’d muted his phone around ten o’clock. He just didn’t have the energy at the time. 

The usual from his teammates. He expects to have one from Eric, for all the teasing about it, but there’s nothing. They’d left off on an awkward note yesterday. His fault. 

_ JZ: You awake? _

Almost instantaneously:

_ EB: unfortunately _

_ EB: what do you need? _

Jack pauses. He doesn’t need anything. He was just looking to talk to a friend. 

_ JZ: Nothing, just bored.  _

_ JZ: Stuck on an airplane.  _

_ EB: wowie _

_ EB: where are you going? _

_ JZ: Visiting my family for the weekend.  _

_ EB: thought you had a game? _

_ EB: when you said you were leaving town i kind of assumed it was for hockey reasons _

_ EB: that you had like, an interview or something _

_ EB: or that you were sitting on a beach somewhere _

_ JZ: Do you even know who my dad is? _

_ EB: i googled you and his name came up _

_ EB: (is that weird? admitting that i googled you?) _

_ EB: ANYWAYS _

_ EB: is four stanley cups like a lot? _

_ JZ: Yes. Yes it is.  _

_ EB: so when you say visiting family you mean extended hockey practice _

_ EB: gotcha _

_ EB: oooh this could be interesting _

_ JZ: ? _

_ EB: stoner kids just walked into work _

_ EB: i’d be shocked if any of them were at least fifteen _

_ EB: they didn’t see me i’m in the back _

_ EB: almost called the cops on them last time  _

_ JZ: What are they doing? _

_ EB: loiter for hours and almost always end up making a mess _

_ EB: THEY KNOCKED OVER A PERFECTLY GOOD PIE YESTERDAY JACK _

_ EB: I WAS READY TO COMMIT A MURDER _

“Mr. Zimmermann? We’re landing soon.” The lone flight attendant sits up in her chair to address him. Jack shoves his phone down deep into his pocket. His mouth goes dry. For half a second he’d forgotten that he was sort of in public, forgotten that someone was watching him stare at his phone and smile suspiciously. 

His phone buzzes frantically against the inside of his jacket a few times. Jack presses it far into his palm to silence it. If the attendant hears, if she assumes anything, she doesn’t say it. 

She gets up to go talk to the pilot and he scratches out a text without even checking the three he’s just gotten.  _ Landing now. Keep me posted.  _

They touch down with a kiss to the earth below.  It’s a far cry from back in the Q when his coaches would pack the entire team into coach and let poor paying passengers deal with it. They would crack down every time they landed and cause a ruckus the entire flight. Twenty-three eighteen year olds in a undersized tin can. It was a recipe for disaster. 

He feels terrible about it now, but at the time he’d been too fascinated with watching with horror as Kent slowly covered a sleeping five-year-old in the next row over in bags of airplane pretzels. There’d been one game, in the dead heat of playoffs, where the league had fucked up and booked both them and a rival team for the same flight. The handful of people unlucky enough to sit between them had been quietly moved while they were still at the gate. Jack ended up sleeping through most of the flight, stressed out from playoffs already. He woke up to the other team’s firstline dmen in an intense conversation as they emptied several cans of coke into a water bottle. “Can I help you?” he’d asked, irritated, and Ransom had put down his pen from where he’d been doing equations on a barf bag against the back of his seat and told him to go back to sleep because he was  _ too nice for the upcoming battle.  _ Or something like that. 

The memory tugs at him unexpectedly, tearing at a wound he’d thought gone. He missed those guys. They hadn’t been the closest of friends, but they were the best pair of d-men he’d ever met. They’d had futures longer than his. Sure as hell hadn’t deserved to go out like that. 

The pilots start shutting the plane down and he lifts himself back into his body. It’ll do him no good to dwell on the past. It’s not a place he needs to be in. 

———————-

Jack hits the Zimmermann backyard rink right before the sun goes down. He’s missing a practice for this little getaway. Sanctioned by his coaches, sure, but he still feels guilty about it. He needs to be ready for this game. His parents and their small collection of friends are up on the balcony, drinking and laughing and paying no attention to him. 

It’s nice to know no one’s watching him. 

He takes easy shots until he loses the light. There are lights on the rink, but he waits to turn them on. Playing in the dark- well, he can’t see the puck well enough to practice, but he does laps instead. With his sight robbed, he relies solely on his old familiars. The ice tells him went to turn, when to miss the wall. The ice never lies. 

There are ghosts dancing alongside him,  _ last person to hit one off Kenny’s visor buys tonight,  _

_ I don’t get it, does he just like to sit in the net and get hit?, _

_ no! wags, listen to the child! i don’t want to get in the net! _

_ GET IN THE HOLE, KENNY, _

Jack swallows and pushes it down, he’d told himself he wasn’t going there tonight, but the brain is not cooperating. 

He closes his eyes and speeds up. He soars blindly across the ice and listens, listens and dissociates as hard as he can. Shitty as a coping strategy, yeah, but there is so much out here to focus on instead of his own body. The air is alive with Montreal at night; beyond the hiss of his skates and the soft clatter of his family sits the muted roar of the wide forest lot the mansion is on. If he focuses, he imagines he can hear the birds singing each other to sleep. 

The lights flick on on the ice, sunspots blaring at the inside of his eyelids.  It blinds him initially, and he halts dead on the ice to rub at his eyes until he stops seeing spots. Voices form around him, half-complete forms still dancing near his ghosts, shadowy blobs of darkness and noise. 

He blinks a few more times, and the players come into focus, circling him like lions around a mouse. 

“Hey, Jack, get off the ice.” yells Mario. “This game is for cup owners only.”

“Try me again in June, eh?” he yells back. 

“Oh, he’s confident, isn’t he?”

“Don’t get cocky, kid.”

Jack laughs forcefully and shoves his way through the ring of hockey uncles until he makes it off the ice. He throws his skates down on the bench outside and slumps down on the ground next to it. 

He watches them chase each other around the rink without trying to make goals. Jagr makes a show of cracking himself across the rink, leaping from the blue line to center in spectacular crackles of red and blue. 

He leans over and pulls his phone out of his bag. 

7:54 AM

_ EB: ok they’re wandering around the front _

_ EB: “i don’t think that asshole’s here”  _

_ EB: EXCUSE YOU THEY DESTROYED MY PIE  _

_ EB: oh good lord i can hear them messing with inventory again _

_ EB: who watches these kids? aren’t they in high school? _

_ EB: question: should i go confront them directly or just scare them off _

8:05 AM

_ EB: you’re not answering _

_ EB: i’m gonna scare them :D _

_ EB: Nursey’s weed patch of hopes and dreams has this one strain he’s been working on for ages  _

_ EB: it makes you hallucinate a thunderstorm  _

_ EB: that’s fairly innocent, right? _

_ EB: may be about to hotbox my own store to chase these kids out _

_ EB: gonna go lock myself in the freezer, will update once the smoke has cleared out _

_ EB: and no chirps from you captain canada  _

_ EB: i won’t freeze over _

8:25 AM

_ EB: ok update: it worked and they are gone _

_ EB: unforeseen downside tho _

_ EB: so maybe nursey wasn’t quite done with his recipe _

_ EB: there may or may not be water puddles in my store _

_ EB: gotta go mop this up :( _

“You can join in if you want.” Bob closes the door to the house behind him, stick flung over his shoulder, and Jack shoves his phone against the ground.

“I’m alright. Tired. But thanks.” 

“You’re probably worn out anyways. That was a hell of a practice you were running.” He drops his stick and walks over to grab his skates, leaving it floating a few inches off the ground. “Never fail to impress me, Jack. But you don’t have to make it that hard on yourself.”

“Just means I’ll get better.” Jack replies. 

Bob nods and pulls his stick back up, walking out towards the rink. “Well, you’re not wrong.”

Jack pushes against the concrete and gets to his feet, phone in hand. He wanders indoors. The faint sound of NBC is playing in the kitchen. 

“-and I mean, we all want to talk about this one. Zimmermann, back where he belongs. Falcs are playing a hell of a season right now.”

“Yeah, we agreed it was a bit of a gamble for them to sign him.”

“That’s an understatement. He was a total wild card. Kid drops off the map for five years, takes his college team to playoffs once, no one knew where he was going. But he’s given the team a boost. It’s showing.”

“He’s no where near what he used to be.”

“That goes without saying, but still. It’s like having Crosby on a bad day. He’s still a damn good player.”

“Oh, sure. I just wish he’d find whatever he had back when he was eighteen. Did he lose his spark in college?”

“A liberal arts school will do that to you.”

Alicia snaps the TV off as soon as he walks into the kitchen. Jack doesn’t acknowledge it. He cracks open the fridge and acquaints a water bottle with the sore spot developing on his back.

“I’m working on my hitlist.” she says. 

“At this rate, I don’t think the networks will have an analyst left.” he replies. Alicia stands on her tiptoes and kisses his forehead, pushing his messy hair back behind his face. Jack feels himself stilling already. 

“What are they doing out there?” she asks. “Measuring dicks again?”

“Yeah.” He slides his phone out of his pocket, milling over a response. “I’m gonna go change.”

“I’ll yell for you when they get back in.”

Jack meanders upstairs, focusing on his phone and stumbling on a few steps. He decides it’s worth the heckling to just call the boy. 

“Hey. What’s the big deal?” Eric answers. Jack walks up towards his old bedroom, not bothering to turn on the lights. 

“There isn’t one? I just felt like talking.” 

“We already were, but ok.” Eric shifts around on the other end of the line. 

“I’m not a huge fan of texting. I’d rather just call you.”

Eric sighs. “Jack, you’re fifty year old in a twenty year old’s body. Are you sure you’re not a vamp?”

“...Yes?”

“Are you  _ sure?” _

“Well, I do like to lock myself up inside all day. And I’ve heard from several reputable reporters that I sparkle.”

Eric laughs. “Are you going to get transferred to the Canucks next season? That gloomy enough for you?” 

“Maybe.” 

Eric keeps making noise, and he’s muffled. 

“What are you doing?” Jack asks. 

“Working on a tart for lunch tomorrow. It has to sit in the fridge overnight.”

Jack collapses against the side of his bed. “Are you always baking?”

“Of course, what else would I be doing? It’s in my blood.”

“But it’s your job, doesn’t it get old?”

“Jack, your whole day is hockey and on your off days you just play more. I mean, if I can trust NBCSN.”

“You’re not wrong, but you can trust NBCSN about as far as you can throw them.”

“So not at all?”

“Yeah.” 

“Just out of curiosity, what gossip sites typically get it right?”

“Nobody’s got a hundred percent. You could always just text me, eh?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Jack hears someone yell across the house on the other end of the line. “Bitty! Where’s the dog food?”

Eric pulls the phone away from his ear, his voice growing distant. “Fourth cabinet from the left!”

“Bitty, huh?” Jack says when he returns. 

“One of my roommates decided I needed a hockey nickname.” 

“I like it.” 

“What’s yours, Jack? Do you even have one?”

“No, not really. Nothing sticks. Tater keeps trying, though.” 

“Ah.” Bitty drops something and curses softly. “How’s Montreal?”

“It’s Montreal. It’s just a mansion, no big deal.”

“Oh.” Bitty goes quiet. 

“You ok?”

“What? Yeah.”

“Does it bother you?” Jack ventures. “When I talk about my house and shit? I can stop-”

“No, that’s fine, I don’t mind it. Kind of jealous, actually.” Bitty takes a deep breath. “It’s just baffling to me that you want to be around someone so not on your level.”

So that’s it. 

“I am allowed to know people that aren’t on the team, right?”

“Yeah, but like half the world knows who you are, and I’m-”

“My friend, Eric. You’re my friend. And it’s nice to have somebody that doesn’t treat me like a celebrity or-” 

_ Or anyone who follows hockey and decides I failed? _

“Anyways.” he says. “I gotta go. I think Mom and Mario are planning something.” He can hear Alicia calling his name from downstairs.

“Mario?”

“I love that you don’t know who that is.” He opens his closet and grabs a t-shirt at random. “See you on Tuesday?” 

He turns his phone on speaker and throws it on his bed while he changes. 

“Yeah, so you can show me around your coliseum of dreams? I’m excited. I think Shitty’s about to, well, shit himself.” 

Jack chuckles and starts dowsnstairs, taking the steps two at a time. “Goodnight, Bitty.”

He hangs up the phone and slides into the kitchen on socked feet. There’s barely room for him to move, with all the hockey uncles standing around. Bob is staring at him. 

“Who was that?”

“Buddy of mine in Providence.” Bob doesn’t abate his capital-L Look. “I have friends who aren’t players.” Jack says slowly. 

“Fuck me, I’m stunned. What, did he hang around the stadium so much you adopted him?”

“Funny. He’s kind of clueless at hockey. He moved to Providence a few months ago and he’s out of his league.” 

Bob and Alicia exchange a look. They’re having a conversation without once saying a word, he recognizes the looks. He just wishes he knew what they’re so interested with. 

“Can I at least have his name? So I can check him against the hitlist?” Alicia asks. She won’t push if he doesn’t want to but this is standard. Paps have pretended to be everything before to get a few details. One had even snuck into his freshman math seminar disguised as a student. 

“Eric Bittle?”

Mario, of all people, stops dead. “Oh damn.”

Jack feels a pit developing in his stomach. “What?”

“Nothing catastrophic. It’s just the Bittles are a pretty famous family down south. Some of the best bakery witches I’ve ever met. I’m kind of ashamed you don’t know that.” Bob says. 

“I blame you for my terrible education.” Jack says. “That makes a lot of sense. Bitty’s good.”

“What the hell is the kid doing out of Madison?” Messier shakes his head. 

“Is that- is that unusual?”

“I mean, it’s not unheard of. But it’s one of those families that stays together, you know? I think they take up half the nearby towns.” says Alicia. “Do you know why he moved?”

“He hasn’t said.” 

“Huh.” says Alicia, and that’s the end of it. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> k, so after some aggressive plotting, the chapter count is going to go up. im not sure to what yet, so im not touching it right now, but it will.  
> ive had so much fun writing this and reading everyone's comments. TYSM! as we start to get into the plot im excited to see where you think im going with this.  
> my knowledge of hockey is kind of limited to the half of the playoffs i watched this year, so, general handwaving in THAT direction

The sun reflects through the stained-glass window and pools wide across the floor. Dust particles swim suspended in the colored light. Eric watches with a bored fascination as they ebb with the airflow blowing along the base of the windows.

His mother taps on his shoulder. “Eric.” 

He can hear the rest of the church rising around him. A tired hymn leaks out of the mouths of his cousins and aunts and uncles. His fingers rest on the rough pine of the top of the pew. They could be fish, he wonders. Sunfish and goldfish, jumping between the panels of molten gold projected on the floor. They find the light glowing through Jesus holding a lamb, all purple and blue this time, and they become ocean whales soaring in the depths. 

“Eric.” his mother says again, more urgent. He snaps himself to attention, fingers flexing around the ancient wood. 

As he stands the congregation around returns to their seats in one solid, final movement. The noise of a hundred people sitting at once echoes dully around the church. Eric goes to do the same, but finds his fingers glued in place. 

Behind him, the tapping of footsteps start up the aisle. 

“Mom?” He turns his head. She is staring at him, eyes flushed deep and black, jaw hanging askew. He feels the heat of one hundred pairs of eyes. The hymn continues to reverberate around the room with no mouth to sing it. 

He stares at the ceiling for four minutes before he realizes he still hears the tapping. 

Nightmares are nothing new, and they rarely make much sense. They don’t often follow him into the world of the living.

Eric rolls over and turns his table lamp on. Nothing’s been moved in his room. They have two ghosts in this house. As far as he knows, both are downstairs. So that’s out.

He swivels to look out his window for an offending tree branch. He’s greeted by a dark blob outside his window, set out against the blowing carpet of snow, feebly tapping at the window pane. 

“Oh, shit.” he hisses, and leaps out of bed. He flings the window open, not caring about the snow that spills over into his room. The raven falls in more than it hops. It flutters his wings, sqwaks something unintelligible, and passes out in Eric’s arms. 

He slams his window shut and pulls the raven as close as he can to his chest. “Shit.” He sprints out of his room and takes the stairs two at a time. The steps creak below him like they’re going to break at any moment, which, given this house, they could. 

“Ransom!” he yells. “Ransom, wake up!”

He turns into the kitchen and smacks the light on. 

“What?” Ransom trots over, leaping into the extended chair in the kitchen. 

“Help me, come on, it just smacked into my window-” 

“Calm down, calm down.” Ransom says. “Towel on the table, set it down.” 

He noses at the bird’s feathers. It stays unconscious, but seizes when Ransom pokes at its right wing.

“It’s exhausted.” he says. “This wing is broken, but I can’t tell how bad. Grab another towel, make it a nest in a box, and I’ll walk you through how to set it in the morning.” 

Eric nods and shakily starts digging in the cupboards for a mostly-empty cereal box. 

“You ok?” asks Ransom. “Do you like- do you know this bird or something? You’re freaking out, man.”

“He’s one of my family’s.” It slips out before Eric can stop it. “I don’t know what the hell it’s doing up here.”

“Your family keeps ravens? Ok.” 

“I don’t think it’s that weird. Is it?”

Ransom shrugs. “It’s a little weird. It’s not like, having the world’s largest collection of chinchillas weird, but it’s a little weird. What do you use them for? Blood magic?”

Eric stops as he tuck the raven into the box-nest. “Do you get all your ideas about witches from Netflix?”

“Holster watches a lot of Charmed. And Supernatural. He calls it research.”

Eric chuckles and shakes his head. “We use them for messages.”

“Your family has access to technology, right? You’re not still relying on smoke signals?” Ransom says. 

“Yeah. I just have some paranoid aunts. Worried about the NSA intercepting them and all that.”

“So you use literal birds.”

“For the big stuff.” Eric sighs and strokes the raven’s head with the back of his head. It doesn’t stir. 

“So you know this is big. But you don’t know what it is.”

“Yep.”

“Hey.” Ransom jumps off the table and nuzzles at Eric’s ankle. “It’s not gonna die. It just needs some rest. So do you.”

“Thanks, Rans.” Eric says. 

“No problem. Go back up to bed. We’ve got the game today, remember?”

“Yeah.”

_ Christ.  _

—————-

“Ten to one, how likely are we to get murdered in this parking lot?” Shitty mutters, stopping the car. They’ve gone around the back end of the stadium. 

“One if we’re lucky.” says Lardo. 

“I swear to-” Eric hits his head against the back of the seat with exasperation. 

“I know, I know, it’s where he told you to go.” Shitty says. He turns the car off. He had been near bouncing with excitement last night, but he does not look at all excited to be here now. 

Lardo leans up between the front seats. “What’s up?” 

“I just realized.” he says. “Hockey bros.”

“Oh yeah.” Lardo makes a face. “Yikes.”

“Hockey bros?” Eric  puts his phone down and twists around to join the conversation. 

“I’m sure Jack’s a piece of sunshine, but-”

“Lardo, where I come from, the local religion is football. I know that sometimes the guys who throw you in a locker and make rapey statements about the cheerleaders are gonna grow up to be pros who do a lot worse. I’m aware of how this could go.  Besides, worse case scenario, we can just sic Shitty on them.” He’s half-joking. 

“That’s a best case scenario.” 

“Works for me.” He opens the door and gets out, letting the cold air in with him. Lardo makes a quick exit behind him.  

The parking lot is huge and empty when it is visible. During game times, it must be packed as tight as a brick wall. At ten in the morning, the only other occupants are the notable late-January piles of gray snow. His attention is caught by one of the ugly monoliths when Lardo elbows him,  _ hard.  _

“Holy fuck who is that.”

“Who? Georgia?” His eyes travel to the woman standing by the door. “She’s one of the managers, Jack said she would meet us here.”

“Fuck.” Lardo turns to Eric. “She’s probably way too old for me.”

“Oh sure.” 

“ _ Fuck.” _

She straightens herself up and smiles as sweetly as she can when she walks up to Georgia. Georgia barely seems to notice them; she’s glued to her phone and busy solving someone else’s fire from the look on her face. 

“You have ID?” she says.

Lardo digs around for her wallet in the depths of her bottomless pit of a bag. She comes up with a new sharpie stain on her hands. Eric opens his wallet for his own, but is stopped by a hand wave from Georgia. 

“Just those two.” she says. “I know who you are.” 

“Jesus.” mutters Shitty. “Jack must never shut up about you.” 

He can hear Ransom and Holster squeaking in his bag. They’ve settled on a schedule- dogs most of the time, mice in case of portability issues. The birds were a thing right up until they got a little too loud in the middle of the grocery store and an employee had shown up with a net.  

They walk past Georgia into a bare stairwell. It’s not reflective of where they are; it could be any section of the stadium.  

“Up or down?” asks Lardo.

“Up, I guess.” Eric picks at random. He pulls himself up the railing and pushes the door open into a wide hall. The places pools with light pouring in from the ceiling-to-floor windows on the left-hand side of the room; along the right hangs a magnificent trophy case. It’s sparsely filled, but decorated to look otherwise. 

“Jesus  _ fuck,”  _ Shitty breathes, staring up at the Falconers logo that hangs over them. “Bitty, you have some fucking incredible luck.”

“It’s all part of my campaign to get you to put pants on.” Lardo says. “Bitty had nothing to do with it.” 

“I can’t wait to see your sugar daddy up close and personal.” says Holster from his backpack.Eric winces. “Y’all-” 

“Do you wanna start taking bets on whether he can deadlift Bitty?” joins in Ransom. 

“Hot.” 

Eric sighs and closes his eyes.  _ They’ll let this go eventually  _ doesn’t apply to the guys, apparently. He resigns himself to talk to them about it later. 

For the moment he doesn’t care to be in this room with them, or on this plane of reality entirely. There’s a sharp prickle on the back of his neck from just being here. He pushes out into the buzz of the stadium around him and steps out of his body.

He starts in the hallway, tapping lightly into the spring of the floorboards. It bounces back with a sigh, strumming with exhaustion. He traces his fingertips across the glass of the trophy case. It burns hot with passion under his hands, so fierce it leaves red marks on his skin. 

Eric stares for a moment, then calmly deconstructs and reforms his hand to wipe the marks away. He wanders farther, into the player’s areas. There are a couple of Falconers in the gym warming up. He recognizes them as player’s he’s seen during practices, but he can’t string jerseys to faces right now. 

He floats into the center and listens. 

“-think Rousso can pull himself together today?” 

“Fuck no. Guy found him passed out in the showers this morning.”

“Motherfucker needs to run his contract out already so we can send him to Edmonton. Or Montreal. Wherever goalies go to die.” The ginger one groans. “If I die on the ice, know I did it trying to salvage this trainwreck of a team.”

“I’ll put that on your headstone.”

Their voices are muted, like song half-heard through a swimming pool.

Eric drops down through the floorboards, sinking through metal into the stadium itself.  The place smells too clean, a bright expanse of blankness that overpowers the echoes of sweat and blood left after games. The planes fit tight across the stands, but as he floats down to the rink itself, all traces of purple and gold vanish, replaced by white that threatens to swallow everything whole. 

Eric breathes deep. He’s been in a few stadiums before, for football games with his father. They were different, green explosions of emotion and fire that ripped across the plane and left smoke trails behind them. Hockey magic is the exact inverse of that fury. It’s a calm he did not expect from such a violent game. In places across the white, there are firecrackers of red and blue, small, pitted spaces in the air that signify remnants of magic. 

He reaches out to touch one, hopefully connect to the moment, when a shadow stretches out across the ice from behind him. Eric bobs around in midair. His eyes can’t focus on the other presence, but it watches him, a dark blob. It takes him a moment to realize it’s another witch, one who is... not good at this. A player? Most likely. Hockeywitches are notoriously untrained. 

The blurry spot hovers, twitching, before zapping out with an electric shock. Eric frowns and hovers over to where it had hung, but finds no trace of it aside from a faint echo of red. 

Oceans away he detects a pointed sensation on his shoulders. He bats at it. The feeling remains, and,  _ oh,  _ it must be on his actual body. 

He soars back upstairs and steps inside his skin shell, redoing the ties that connect him. 

Eric opens his eyes. 

Lardo releases his her hand from her mouth. “Oh good, you aren’t dead.”

“Huh?” He flexes his fingers, reacquainting himself with his body after spending so long out of it.

“You weren’t breathing for a good four minutes there, bro.” says Shitty. 

“That’s fine, that won’t kill me.” he reassures him. He takes a few steps, breaking the feeling back into his legs. There’s a player up here with them, a tall, beak-nosed man watching him with interest. 

“Did you follow me?” Eric asks. 

He nods.. “Tater. Did not know Zimmboni’s boy so good.” 

Eric shrugs. “I’ve just had a lot of practice.” 

“He said you were fine, but you weren’t breathing, so,” starts Shitty. 

“Went after you.” says Tater. 

Jack opens the door at the far end of the hallway. “There you are. Georgia said she kind of let you loose...hey, Tater.”

“Zimmboni!” Tater claps his shoulder as he walks past. Jack makes a small noise but doesn’t say anything. 

“Zimmboni?” Shitty asks. 

“He’s trying to find me a nickname. Kind of determined. So. Hi.” 

Eric flusters under Jack’s sudden spotlight. “Hi.” 

Holster makes a faint cooing sound from his backpack. He jams an elbow into the lower section, hoping to displace him from whatever he’s sat on. 

“Brah, this is sick.” Shitty takes over for him. “Thanks for getting us in. I’m Shitty.”

Jack smirks and pushes the door open. “I’m just warning you, my teammates are not going to leave us alone.”

“Hockey butts? Fuck yeah.” Lardo winks at Eric and pats his shoulder. He breathes. 

——————

The Aces play a hard game, tying it up in the first period after Guy lands a goal early. They switch their goalie out in the middle of the second, throwing out Wendy, a much younger, more inexperienced player. 

“What the hell are they doing?” laughs Marty. “They’re throwing away their game.”

Not a single shot pushed against him goes in. 

It’s infuriating; at first Jack chalks it up to bad luck, but then Parse gets pulled on a penalty and they get six scoring chances in the resulting power play. All of them fail, even one Jack was certain was clean. Wendy had been several feet away from the goal. Somehow he’d made it back in time. 

He twists over to look at Bitty, seated a few seats behind the bench. He’s incensed. When he sees Jack, he stops talking to Shitty and shakes his head. 

Marty calls a timeout. 

“Fuck, guys.” He leans himself against the wall. “I don’t get it. We can’t get a shot on this guy and Snowy needs a fucking break.”

“They’re cheating.” Tater grumbles. He’s been on the ice almost as long as Snowy. 

“Shit, really?” says Guy. 

“Goalie moving shots.” 

“Motherfucker.” Marty slams a gloved fist into the wall.”PARSE!” 

Kent looks up from the Aces’ bench. He slides over with a shit-eating grin on his face. “What’s your problem?”

Jack groans and pushes himself out of his seat. “Stop throwing shots, you ass.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This another one of your superstitions?”

Jack fists his hand against the railing. Guy grips harder on his stick. 

“You stop fucking cheating.” Marty says coolly, staring Kent down.

“It’s not in the rulebook.”

“Doesn’t make it fair.” 

“So? You can’t do shit against me.” 

Marty noses up to him. “Okay. If this is how we're playing, let's fucking go. ”

“Uhuh. Tater won’t last another ten on the ice. And last I checked he was your only wildcard.” He pauses. “Or the only one willing to try. I’ve got a handful of rookie forwards who are just dying to take out Rousso. Think he’ll last against them?”

He turns and skates off. 

“Fuck. Ok. Tater. Think you can take a shot at him?” Marty asks. 

“Could put a puck through skull.” Tater huffs. “Will try.”

“Do your best not to drop on me. Zimmermann, cover him. We need to drag this out until the end of third.  Pull Snowy, I’ll take Robin and run defense.”

“Marty, you need to take a break at some point.” says Jack.

“I know. It’s gonna be a long shift for all of us tonight.” he says. “But I refuse to go down to this asshole without trying.”

“No shit.” says Jack. He gets to his feet and follows Tater out. Kent catches his eye as he walks on. He smirks and turns away, not holding the eye contact for long. 

He sticks close to Tater. The Aces dmen come for him hard, throwing him into the boards within thirty seconds of play resuming. He gets up. He keeps going. 

Tater plays it low at first, dragging out the timer while the right-winger takes potshots at Wendy. He takes a shot, skipping it through a d-mans calf and clean into the net. 

The celebration doesn’t last long. Two minutes later an Aces forward has one on Rousso. 

Jack runs up into a d-man that fights him until he drops and sprawls across the ice. Out of the corner of his eye he watches Tater take another shot. It skips across the ice, floating through a forward’s skates, but at the last second Wendy neatly phases it away from the net without batting an eye. 

Tater slows down. He’s shaking on his feet, leaning on his stick for balance. He’s too exhausted for another attempt. 

“Tater.” Jack taps him on the shoulder. “Go. You’re gonna fall over.”

“No-”

“You did your job. Let me try to do mine.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah.” Jack grits his teeth and lines up for the play to restart. Marty keeps Rousso clear, throwing the puck down the rink, where it takes a neat curve around Wendy and into the back wall. There’s a skirmish for it there. Guy pulls it clear and throws it to Jack. The d-men descend on him and he pulls back, twisting out of their reach. The world blurs hard as he pushes towards the blue line. He switches his vision to the ice instead, losing himself in the clean expanse. Jack curls up tight within himself, feeling every tense breath that fights its way out of his lungs. 

He could take the shot. 

He stares into the fuzzy spots forming on his vision from the strain of looking at the ice. They bubble, swelling larger as he focuses. The bubbles spit red and blue arcs across his line of vision. Time slows down. 

Jack focuses at the world through his 3-D glasses, taking note of everything. Tater watching him, his exterior dark and blurry. Bitty with his hand half in his mouth, soft waves of purple and gold pulsing from him. Wendy, crouched to catch his shot, already bending a red-blue hole where the puck will land to push it away. Everyone else is still and silent. 

Jack peels at the skin of the world, cutting a hole just before Wendy’s honeytrap. He cuts away an arc behind him to finish the job. His blood ices over with the act, chilling him deep under layers of sweat and exhaustion. 

Close eyes. Breathe. Restart. 

Take the shot. 

The puck soars clean. Wendy rolls his eyes and barely moves. It flies near his mitt and then jumps, blinking under his open mitt and into the net. 

Jack has no time to catch his breath before the entirety of the Falconer’s third line is upon him. They’re screaming, triumphant.

In the back of his brain he hears the timer run out. 

——-

_ EB: JACK _

_ EB: WHAT THE FUCK  _

_ EB: I DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD DO THAT _

_ EB: HOLY SHIT _

_ EB: THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE LOOK ON PARSON’S FACE _

_ EB: I THOUGHT HE WAS GONNA KILL A MAN _

_ EB: HE WAS SO ANGRY THAT WAS AMAZING _

“Holy shit, Bitty.” Ransom says from his shoulder. “I can’t believe you did that.” 

“What?” Eric drops his phone. “I didn’t- that was  _ Jack-” _

Holster laughs. “We played with him for two years. We’d know if he was secretly Potter.”

“No, I swear-”

“Seriously, Bitty. I didn’t realize you were gone enough on that boy to throw the game in his favor.” 

“Will you shut up?” Eric grabs Holster off his backpack. “I didn’t do shit. And stop calling him my boy.”

“Ok, ok, Jesus!” Holster squeaks. “Put me down!”

Eric sets him down on the bleacher. Ransom jumps off his shoulder to join him, sniffing at Holster and glaring at Bitty. 

“We’re not mad you threw it.” Ransom grumbles. “Parson already has a cup, he could stand to be thrown down a few pegs.  Just don’t try to feed us some bs about Jack being a witch.”

“But I saw him do it.” Eric says, mostly to himself. He’s staring out into the rink again. 

“Chyeah, sure you did.”

———————--

The press descends before they even leave the locker room. Jack tries to get his jersey off but ends up in front of a camera instead, microphone shoved an inch away from his lips. 

“What a game, Jack.” Adam Ferris, NBCSN reporter, long time pain in his ass, throws an arm around him. “You had us all on the edge of our seats. What can you tell us?”

Jack blinks, clearing his eyes against the white blare of the lights against him. Focus. Interview mode. 

He’s still thinking about the puck blinking through space. 

“The Aces brought a hard game tonight.” he says flatly. “We just didn’t give in.”

“You took a lot of shots, but that goalie, huh?”

“Wendy’s a strong player.”

“He made the Falcs look more like an AHL team than pros. But you took care of that! That was an amazing shot. Right before the bell, and I’m still trying to figure out how it went in.” 

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Jackie. I’ve been following you since you were a kid.” Adam smiles at him, wide and fake. “You never played a game like this at Samwell. But look at you! Back where you belong, and you’re already playing like you did in juniors. You’ve got your mojo back!”

Jack laughs as convincingly as he can. His mind is on ambulances, on dark nights, on Kent telling him to turn off the tv, on what this one will cost him. 

——————-

The raven is awake when Eric returns to his room. 

_ I bring news,  _ it croaks. 

“Not now.” he mutters. His head is pounding from the noise of the game. He’s not sure he can take whatever horrors the Bitles are going to drop on him this time.

How could they think he threw it? He wouldn't dare. 

The raven tilts his head at him. Just the sight is setting off a tick of panic in his heart. Who’s died now, his mother? Why bother reaching out to him at all? Two years and nothing. Two years and an aunt who had died in a car crash and a cousin with leukemia and he’d found out about through the obituary section. 

Eric tips forward and collapses onto his bed. He breathes into the sheets for a moment and listens. Below, Ransom and Holster are yapping about whatever Shitty’s attempting in his kitchen. It’s easy banter. Nothing of note.

He knits his eyes against the cotton and kicks back his tears. It was a good day, minor complications aside. He can’t wait until Jack gets out of the press gauntlet so they can talk about this. He shouldn’t be crying. 

Nothing of note.

Eric groans and rolls over to stare at the ceiling. He grabs for his phone. Six different texts from his mother in the last hour, when she hasn’t texted him in two whole weeks prior. At least she’s alive. 

_ Eric, honey, where are you? _

_ I know you don’t like to tell me but it’s very important somebody knows where to find you.  _

_ Please answer.  _

_ Something’s happened. Sara Ruth sent a raven. I’m not sure it reached you.  _

_ Call me if you didn’t get it.  _

_ We need you to come home.  _

He stares at the last one. He can’t remember how to breathe. 

_ We need you to come home.  _

He swings upright to sit at the side of his bed, phone still glowing in his hand.

“Ok.” he says to the raven. “Tell me.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we have a chapter count again! and would you know, with the all the redrafting i did, i had to throw out like 4k? uggggghh. i love this hobby so much.  
> i know it's included in the chapter tags, but i should reinforce the anxiety tw as we get into it. just in case.

“Up at number one on the highlight reel: did anyone catch this gem at the Stars game on Sunday?”

Jack opens his cabinet. He needs to go to the grocery store again. He’s been home for maybe ten minutes in the past two weeks. It’d been in the schedule for last Friday, but then they’d had that away game with the Blues. It'd gone into overtime, he'd gotten home too late. No groceries. So he’d shifted it to Monday, but then practice for the Aces game had kicked in. Coach Reed was running them like they were in the playoffs already. It was a funny, yet futile attempt. They’d be lucky to get a wildcard spot with their current record.

“Wow.”

“I know, right? Goes right through Demers’ visor. It’s a wonder he just got a black eye.”

All he’s got is a mostly-empty, sad box of mini wheats. He wonders what Bittle normally makes in the mornings.

It’s probably fluffy. Involves way more sugar than his diet allows.

He finds his phone under his running jacket and leans forward into the counter, supporting himself with ribs against granite. Jack opens his texts idly while the TV runs the accident on replay.

_Mom: mind if I drop in this weekend?_

There. He doesn’t want her to come over but otherwise he’ll have no motivation to refill his fridge. And clean up his house.

“Next up after the commercial break: Falconers coach Hunter Reed drops in. We’ll talk current developments in his team and last night’s game.”

_KP: damn bro._

_KP: if you’re going to be so effortless about kicking my ass by all means continue_

Huh. It’s been a few months. That’s a little surprising, but not entirely.

“Reed, thanks for joining us. I mean, where do we start? We don’t usually see play like that in the offseason.”

“The team played a great game last night. It was tight, but they pulled through.”

“Tight is an understatement. That ran down to the last thirty seconds of the game.”

_JZ: hour five_

_JZ: you?_

He gets a picture of Kent, shirtless on his couch with a bowl of lucky charms and a white fluffball squashed over most of his face.

_KP: run? what run?_

“Yeah, overtime was a real threat this time around.”

“We had some real dedication out there. Alexi Mashkov and Martin Harrison both spent upwards of thirty minutes on the ice, Nick Snowchowski was just under forty-five. You ran your first line into the ground.”

“Y’know, that was Harrison’s call.”

“Sign of weakness in your second and third.”

_KP: fuck man, even your coach is ripping your team apart_

_KP: good fucking morning to you too_

_JZ: didn’t realize you were watching this_

_KP: see changing the channel would involve moving_

_KP: so nah_

_KP: also i feel like watching my ass get kicked over and over again_

“It’s something we’ll have to get working on when the boys meet up again.”

“What about Zimmermann?”

“About him.”

“You kept him off the ice for a long time.”

“And he showed up when he got on.”

“That he did, but benching your star player for most of the game? Were you worried about him and Kent Parson having it out? A lot of people are itching to see him in his first fight, that could have been interesting.”

_KP: wanna knock some of my teeth out zimms?_

_KP: do it for the camera_

He laughs a little at that, but he’s more concerned with the tightening screw in his chest.

“I don’t know where the rumors of them having a falling out come from-”

“Guy pulls a Lindsay Lohan, disappears for five years, and then comes back expecting to be the league’s golden boy again. If I was Parson, I’d be angry. I worked for my position and he just waltzes back in like he’s owed the C.”

He needs to find the goddamn remote.

‘It’s just as likely they haven’t had the time to reconnect. It’s not like they’re Benn and Seguin. They play for different teams.”

“True, true. But this isn’t what we wanted to discuss about Jack Zimmermann.”

He’d put it in the tv stand, last he’d checked, but that had been two weeks ago.

“Yeah. _This_ is what we wanted to talk about Jack Zimmermann. Look at that beauty of a play. He just slides through the d-men like they’re insignificant, and then, boom! I thought for sure that was a miss, but he knew what he was doing.”

“Zimmermann’s got a gift, you can’t deny that. I just wish he’d found his groove before last night. Could have saved us a lot of losses early on.”

“It’ll be good for all of us if he keeps this up, eh?”

_Fuck._

“Absolutely.”

“Unless he pulls a diva and starts making contract demands.”

He slams his hand into the power button on the top of the TV.

Well, it works.

Jack grabs a pillow off his couch and pushes his face into it, breathing. He ignores the feathers tickling his nose and tries to push past the brick sitting in his head. It, as bricks tend to do, does not move. He can breath just fine, but the hooks are developing. They snatch at the carpet and the floorboards. There’s just enough elasticity to move to his room, maybe, put on a documentary and stare at the screen without processing any of it. But he’s not going anywhere today.

And he’s got to be at the stadium in two hours to go over tape with the team.

He draws his knees up to sandwich the pillow between him and his face. He tries to hold his breath and shove the brick away. He shifts his focus, knitting his eyes together and slipping into the darkness behind his eyes. Jack avoids all traces of color- Jesus Christ, he doesn’t want to go there- and he focuses instead on the emptiness, but it does nothing.

This is a meds-level situation. He doesn’t want it to be a meds-level situation. He’d been doing so well.

He holds himself there for another fifteen, or at least what feels like fifteen. His phone goes off a few more times beside him, then stills as Kent gives up on whatever he was talking about. Jack sets the pillow down and lets his eyes refocus. He gets up and walks towards the bathroom. Someone a lot smarter than him determined he should only have a handful of his meds on him for obvious reasons. It reassured him, even if he had to refill more frequently than he felt like. At least he couldn’t overdose by accident.

Jack dry swallows a pill. He braces his hands on the side of the sink and stares deep into the porcelain for an indeterminate amount of time, at least until he can feel the hooks starting to release. He leans over and starts the shower.

This is going to be his life for the rest of the week. He can tell already. Fuck, he hates this.

—————

“Jack,” half-yells Kent when he walks in the room. “Jaaack.”

He’s laid out on their hotel bed, remote in his hand, watching some shitty cooking show and working through a six-pack. Jack walks past without saying anything.

Kent pushes up onto his elbows. He drops the remote, offended. “I’ve been laying here trying not to deal with this boner for an hour and a half, waiting for you to get back, and this is the welcome I get?”

Jack still says nothing, his head tilted back, eyes half-closed. He pushes into the small space they call a bathroom, digging through his bag perched on the sink.

“Oh, shit, one of those nights, huh?” Kent asks. He kicks back as much of his beer as he can stomach to swallow. Jack pulls out a pill bottle and sits down on the other bed.

“Here.” Kent hands him the remnants of his beer as he cracks open the bottle. He climbs off his own bed and mutes the tv, sitting next to Jack while he kicks back his meds. Two blue pills, half a Pilsner.

Jack stares at the ceiling and counts cracks. Kent keeps his hand balanced on the curve of Jack’s back.

After a few minutes Jack stops counting and Kent removes the ghost of his hand.

“Better?”

“Enough.” He rubs at his eyes. “I fucking hate this.”

“You and me both.” says Kent. “Look, your dad’s like practically fucking the Merlin of hockey, right? Doesn’t he know some trick to get rid of this? Some spell to whisk it away?”

“I don’t know.” Jack mumbles. “I don’t care. I just want it to fucking stop.”

——————

_EB: jack_

_EB: you busy?_

_JZ: kind of_

_JZ: actually no we’re watching tape distract me_

_EB: ?????_

_EB: jack not working? willingly?_

_EB: who are you_

_JZ: not interested in rewatching that play_

_EB: are you kidding me rn_

_EB: you dont want to rewatch yourself assassinating kp_

_JZ: not really_

_JZ: shouldnt have done it_

_EB: he had it coming_

_JZ: no one did. it was a mistake. i was being petty._

_EB: i thought you hated him?_

_JZ: I don’t._

_JZ: Where did you get that one? NBC?_

_JZ: Don’t assume you know what happened there._

_EB: oh_

_EB: sorry_

_EB: i gotta go to work ttyl_

——————

Eric sets his phone down on the floury counter and returns to pounding the turnover dough into submission. The impact creates a small cloud of flour that dusts his knuckles, his shirt, and most of his clothes. Well, it ain’t winter if he’s not covered with white.

Shitty jumps off the third step from the floor and slides into the kitchen. “Holy fuck, what is that.”

He leans over Eric’s shoulder to steal a handful of grapes out of the bag on the counter.

“Grape turnovers.” He watches Shitty carefully, sliding the bag away when he’s taken enough. Shitty slinks off to sit on the table, eating grapes with one hand and making at attempt to repair his ponytail with the other.

“We do not deserve you.” he says. “Oh my god. Thought you had work, though?”

“Not for another hour. I can at least get these in the oven.” He pinches off a corner of the dough and starts flattening it out into a rough diamond.

“I’m getting you a fucking statue.”

Lardo wanders down, still wearing yesterday’s sweater. She shoves Shitty out of the way and makes a beeline for the coffeemaker.

“I don’t think we have any mugs clean.” Eric warns her. “Didn’t have time to do dishes yesterday.”

Lardo picks up the entire pot and takes a drink directly out of it. She stares at the floor for a second. “Ok. I’m conscious. That looks incredible.”

Shitty holds out the last of his stolen handful of grapes. She pops it into her mouth and washes it down with another swig of the coffee pot. “Hang on,” she says, “ dogs can’t eat grapes.”

“And dogs shouldn’t be speculating on my relationship status, but you know.”

“Damn.” Shitty whispers. From the living room comes a dog whine so pitiful it should star in an ASPCA commercial.

Holster leaps over the couch back, Ransom following him at a steady trot. He stumbles against the floury floor. Holster comes up and rubs against Bitty like a cat. “We’re sorry, we’re sorry, please give us our pie.”

“Say it.”

“We solemnly swear to drop it.” Ransom sits down and does his best impression of Bambi.

“And we’ll believe Bitty when he says he didn’t do something.” Eric grouses. He breaks off a piece of crust with his fingers and drops it on the floor. Near murder ensues as they fight over it.

Eric finishes folding the turnovers into stuffed squares and puts them in the oven. As soon as he leaves Holster grabs a discarded piece of crust off the dirty counter and wanders back out to the living room. He shoves Ransom aside in the dog bed that is frankly too small for him, let alone both of them. Ransom falls out and jumps back in on top of Holster, using him as a new perch.

“Do you think he did it?” Ransom says. “Threw the game for Jack?”

“I don’t know.” Holster says. “I was convinced last night. But he’s obviously upset about it.”

“So maybe Bitty didn’t do it. Then who? Tater?”

“He was on the ice for fucking ever.” says Holster. “Listen...I don’t know exactly how this sort of thing works, but I’m thinking he would have been too tired.”

“Someone else on the Falconers, then.” says Ransom.

“Well, then it could have been fucking anybody. Hell, it could have just been a fan who happened to come that night.” He sits up slightly and nearly sends Ransom tumbling again. “But not, Jack, right? I mean, we would have known.”

“We must have. We knew about Price and Denton. Denton didn’t even play on our team. Jack was one of the best, but I never caught him moving pucks or anything.”

“Yeah. You don’t miss that shit.”

————-

_JZ: hey_

_JZ: didn’t mean to get mad earlier_

_JZ: just didn’t feel like talking about it_

_JZ: you there?_

_EB: yeah_

_EB: shouldn’t have brought it up_

_JZ: its not your fault you dont know about this shit_

_EB: ok_

_JZ: today has not been the best day for a lot of reasons_

_EB: yeah same_

_JZ: coffee later?_

_EB: sure :)_

_EB: oh my god i have a lot of questions_

_JZ: want to play dumbledore, eh?_

_EB:........_

_EB: i am stunned_

_EB: you actually know that reference_

_EB: and by GOD do I_

_JZ: i dont live under a rock_

_EB: no you live under a puck_

_JZ: but really, can we not?_

_JZ: im not interested in doing it again_

_EB: ok sure_

_EB: (you’re crushing my dumbledore dreams)_

_EB: (my dumbledreams)_

_JZ: aren’t you working_

_EB: theoretically_

—————-

He had suggested the coffee rendezvous on a good moment, but by six pm his meds have worn off and the edge has returned. The hooks are saying to head back to his room and bury his head there for the rest of the day. It’s a nice prospect, but he had plans, goddamnit.  

_JZ: can you grab me one of my thingies on your way out_

_EB: yeah sure_

He doesn’t question it, even for a second. Jack likes that about Bitty.

He wonders for a brief moment if he should be taking his meds and Nursey’s substitute within a few hours of each other. He decides he doesn’t care. He needs coffee and a smiling southern man, despite his brain saying otherwise.

Jack finds a quiet corner in Annie’s and slides his headphones in, drowning out the noise around him with the sounds of the Eighties Greatest Hits. He buries his face into the windowpane and closes his eyes. With luck no one will recognize him. It’s not a good sign for the Falconer’s biggest star to be caught being a rambling wreck in public.

Bitty pads up wordlessly and slides the package across the table before disappearing to get coffee. Jack unwraps it with shaking hands and chugs the slim glass bottle hiding under all the wrapping. The storm-gray liquid buzzes down his throat, radiating through his lungs and chest with a electric hum that stills the shake in his hands.

“You good?” Bitty asks when he returns. He’s carrying a rather ridiculous peppermint concoction for himself, with a mountain of whipped cream piled on top, and a flat black for Jack. Jack can’t remember ever telling him his coffee preferences, but Bitty has some sort of sixth sense when it comes to food.

“Yeah.” he says with a firm smile.

“Ugh, I understand the shit day though.” Bitty buries his face in the table momentarily.

“What’s up?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m done processing it. You?”

“Interviewers sure likes replaying the one thing I’m not proud of.”

Bitty makes a face. “Gross. Anyways.” He scoops a piece of whipped cream off with his finger. “Wanna hear about the weird customers I got today?”

“Always.”

“So I’m working in the back, minding my own business, when Nursey pokes his head and asks me to take care of this customer for him. Usually when he does that it’s cause he’s tired of dealing with stupid and just wants to pass it off onto me. So I’m like good lord, how bad can this one possibly be?”

“And?”

“It’s this middle-aged lady from like Texas or something. She can’t tell me what she wants, only that she remembers it was clear and made her feel “all bubbly inside”.”

“Did you redirect her to the liquor store?”

“I know, right? I almost did. Took her twenty minutes to tell me what she actually wanted.” He swirls his coffee for dramatic effect. “And then this kid I was certain was underage tried to get me to sell them an aphrodisiac. When I asked for their ID, they just waved their hands at me and said “I don’t need to show you an ID.” Like buddy. Kid. That’s not how magic works.”

It’s warm in here, calm. He’ll do ok.

“Sounds like they’d fit in with your stoners.” he says.

“They might have been one, who knows. All those kid faces look the same to me.” Bitty waves his coffee a little too dramatically and ends up with whipped cream on his nose. Jack laughs into his hand.

“Stop that.” Bitty teases, wiping it off with the back of his hand. “So what’s going on that hectic life of partying you supposedly have?”

“Uh, I think my mom’s coming over this weekend? Other than that I was just planning on doing a little extra practice and reading this new biography I got.”

“Wow, newsworthy. Actual reading?”

“...Yes?”

“You nerd.”

“Bitty, I was a history major.” Jack chuffs.

“Wait, really?” says Bitty. “Huh. That was not one of the things that came up when I googled you.”

“Yeah, most news orgs don’t care about what I did in college.” he says. “But I enjoyed Samwell. It was fun. For like a year and a half after- well, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to put myself back in the NHL pool. Thought I’d try to figure out something else to do with my life.”

“Huh. You could retire and be the coolest history professor in existence.”

“That’s not a bad idea, actually.” Jack stares across the window, at the sun moving low in the sky. In a few minutes his phone will go off telling him he has to get home for dinner.

His eyes move to Bitty, still talking, still in his coat even when Annie’s has their heat cranked. He’s a sunray, beaming off light even when the winter sun betrays them all early. His hair falls in his face repeatedly as he talks, and he brushes it out of his eyes and keeps going.

His phone goes off with his alarm. He ignores it. He wants to sit here and bask for the next week, let the sunlight burn away the inevitable hurdles before him.

“Goodness, I need to get going.” Bitty says at some ambiguous point. “My housemates are going to think I died or something.”

“Yeah, thanks for this.” says Jack. He watches him leave, then sits there for another few minutes, finishing his coffee in peace. He hears another buzz and irritatedly reaches for his phone when he realizes it’s not his.

Huh. Bitty must have left his phone by accident.

He pockets it and makes a note to drop by Bitty’s shop before practice tomorrow.  

——————

“Hey, Dex.”

Dex puts down his notepad and looks up from his spot on the floor. Nursey leans over the counter with a pile of rice grains cupped in his palm. He grins cockily, wagging his fingers and threatening to drop the pile.

“You just want to fucking die tonight, don’t you.” Dex snarls. Nursey spreads his fingers a little wider and lets a few drop out.

 _One, two, three, four, five._ he counts silently. Nursey giggles.

Dex reaches his free hand over and grabs a rat out of his lunchbox. Nursey’s expression changes from delight to outright horror.

“Don’t you dare.”

“What’s that, Nursey? I hate making out with Dex with rat breath?”

Weapons are returned to their holsters. Nursey sighs and returns his rice handful to the jar on the counter. Dex puts the rat back down.

“Hey, get me another juicebox.” he says, picking up his notepad and cracking open a dusty old container of beetle eyes.

“I think we just have AB negative left.”

“Too hungry to care.” He tips the jar out into an empty sandwich box and starts counting.

The bell on the front door goes off when he’s about halfway through the jar. “Motherfucker.” he whispers. He can’t move his eyes until he finishes the job and Nursey is somewhere in the back.

“Hello?”

They’re closed, for fuck’s sake, all the lights are off.

Nursey pops out of the back, tossing a sippy cup full of red in Dex’s general direction. “Oh, hi.” he says to the unseen customer. “We’re closed.”

“I’m not looking to buy anything.” says the voice. “I’m looking for my cousin, Eric. I heard he works here.”

Dex finishes counting and goes to get up from behind the counter, but Nursey waves at him to stay in place. He cranes his neck to look through the glass of the display case instead. It’s a girl of around fifteen or sixteen, short with thick, dark curls that hang to her chin. She has the same doe-eyed face as Bitty, although her accent is a good bit stronger.

“And who are you?” Nursey says.

“Goodness, where are my manners. I’m Sara Ruth Bittle.” She tucks her hair behind her ear nervously. “I hate to bother y’all so late at night, he’s just not answering his phone.”

“He’s off all week, I have no idea where he is.” answers Nursey coolly.

“Alright, thank you.”

She smiles and walks back out the door. Dex uncurls his spine and removes himself from behind the display case.

“Follow her?” he asks. Nursey nods.

Dex throws his hood up over his face and wanders out into the night. He bites at the inside of his cheek, humming the Batman theme as he steps wide arcs around streetlamps. As soon as they’ve lost everyone else in the crowd, he folds up inside his hoodie, letting his body compact into the black-leather casing. He hopes some kid doesn’t see him get wingy and have nightmares for the rest of the week.

He soars low into the night, just above Sara Ruth’s head. She walks for nearly half an hour, checking over her shoulder every couple of minutes. He can’t figure out where the hell she’s going. She’s taking a backwards way, no matter what: either trying to shake a tail or getting completely lost.

She stops dead in the middle of a residential street, and Dex comes to a hovery halt above her. He snatches a couple of moths out of the vicinity of a streetlamp as he waits for something to happen.

Sara Ruth closes her eyes and tilts her head back. The thick puff of her black coat turns sleek and shiny, raising up in uneven patches. Her eyes tilt back and stretch, ears drawing up into a sharp point and moving higher up on her head. Her feet raise into unnatural arches, forming soft, rounded paws at the tips. Her entire body folds inwards, and Dex finds himself trying to chase down a jet black cat on a unlit street at two in the morning.

_Shit._

He closes his eyes and clicks into the night, but wherever she’s gone his echolocation can’t find her.

Dex turns and flies back towards home.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for casual ableism/misogyny in the dialouge in this chapter. there's also a light bit of sexual content, but not enough to mess with the rating rn. (although if i keep my current draft it will go up at some point.)  
> this chapter is a good bit longer than some of the ones i've posted. the next few are going to be as well, and so it might take some extra time for me to get them up. right now i've been sticking to a rough five-day update schedule but that will probably shift as im also going out of town this week.

Eric knits his legs together and kicks loosely into the dirt under the swing. He’s a lone figure in the abandoned playground, spreading dirt across the blacktop past the swings as he moves. The playground is haunting in the predawn light. Once upon a time, there had probably been some sort of residential area here, and children who loved on and played on these swings. He can feel the old excitement and joy if he cares to reach out. Now it’s overgrown with weeds and ferns, ivy wrapping around the legs of slides. A fine coat of fog slides over his feet. It claims possession of everything from the slide to the overgrown field clinging to the outside.

His eye catches movement in the tree line, a fern bending too severely as it’s stepped on.

A dark black cat slinks out and runs flat onto the asphalt. It stops to flick the snow off it’s nose and then stretches out its back, growing a good three feet in a few seconds. It’s tail recedes into its back, fur turning into a sleek polyester coat, ears dropping down to a normal human distance.

Eric kicks the heel of his shoe into the dirt, stopping himself hard, and leaps off the swing.

“Hi.” Sara Ruth waves feebly, still trying to get an errant snowflake off her face.

He doesn’t say anything, but pulls his arm around her shoulders. Sara Ruth makes a fake choking sound. She returns the hug anyways.

She barely fits in under his chin anymore. Eric remembers her at fifteen, five-three and just finishing her first year of high school. Now she’s nearly as tall as he is. She’s lost that baby deer look of bewilderment. Two years and she looks like she knows what’s she’s doing better than he does.

“Missed you.” he says.

“You too, idiot.” She makes a loose pass at his shoulder with her hand. He dodges and stands up on his toes to ruffle her hair.

“Are you ok?”

“Doing fine, if school doesn’t kill me.” She walks across the blacktop and sits down in one of the swings.A breeze lifts through the playground, blowing her curls in front of her sightline. “Goodness, how do you live up here? It’s freezing!”

Eric chuckles and takes the other swing. “I’m slowly getting used to it.” He twists his hand in the metal links of the swing, feeling the cold through his gloves. It wakes him up fast, despite the hour. “How did you find me?”

“Sable found you, after your stupid weather almost killed him. It took him so long, too. You need to be nicer to my familiar.” She pouts. “They’re useful. You should get one.”

“I’m good.” Eric shakes his head. One less thing for the extended family to track. He’s stunned she found him at all; he’d been certain he was buried deep. “How’s everyone?”

“Oh, the usual. We miss you a lot. Your dad told me to pass along that he’s tired of you wimping out and not coaching pewee with him. I think he was joking? George and Theo moved out to Savannah, Annie’s starting high school in August and I think Aunt Ruby might be having a heart attack over it. Jennie Mason had another baby.”

“Business as usual?”

“With the exception of Aunt Suzie.”

Eric tightens his grip around the swing. “What about my mom?”

“Oh, she only freaked out when I mentioned you were in Rhode island. Apparently, the last time she heard anything about your whereabouts was when you were New Orleans.”

“I haven’t lived in New Orleans for almost a year and a half.”  

“Exactly, you ass. Tell her where you are more often.” Sara Ruth stares him down icily. “I don’t want to freak your mom out again. She worries too much about you.”

“She knows- you know- why I don’t tell y’all where I am. And she knows I’m doing ok.”

“Yeah, well, would it kill you to update us once in awhile? I’m not asking for every time you hop states. Just once every couple of months.”

Eric sighs.

“Not that it’ll matter soon.” Sara Ruth grumbles. “Will you be there in time for the funeral?”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot I have to sort out here. I can at least be there for the funeral itself, but afterwards- might be a couple weeks. If I stay at all.”

“All this and you’re still unsure?” she asks. “What are you worried about?”

“I left for a reason.” he says pointedly. “I’m just worried nothing’s changed.”

“Eric.” Sara Ruth twists her body in the swing to look directly at him. “You know most of the reason people wanted you out was because of her. They didn’t really hate you. They just listened to Grandma, you know?”

“They didn’t stand with me before.”

“They’ll stand behind you now. I can at least promise you’ll have support. You deserve this more than any one of us.”

“I know. I just need some time to think about it.” He looks up to her. “Are you planning on staying in town?”

“If you want me to.”

“That’d be really nice, yeah.” Eric says. “You should meet some of my friends here. But promise me you will not tell my mom about the state of my house, ok? ”

“Oh, good lord, I can’t wait to see it if you’re that worried.”

“I swear it’s- no, no, it’s that bad.” He shakes his head. Sara Ruth perks up, staring across the playground to the dropoff on the far side.

“What?”

“I could have sworn I hear someone calling for you.” she says. She drops off the swing and slips behind one of the slides, unseen to anyone else nearby. Eric walks off more casually. He hears nothing at first, then the sharp jingle of a dog collar.

“Hello?” he calls, and Holster comes barrelling up the hill, all sixty-seven pounds of dog colliding with his chest. Eric takes the hit lightly, landing on his ass.

“Where have you been?” Holster yaps. He pushes his face up into Eric, sniffing him. “And why do you smell like cat?”

Out of the corner of his eye Sara Ruth slips forward, her hands moving slightly.

Lardo walks up the hill behind him. “Thank fuck, you found him.” she sighs.

“Hold up, why are you two freaking out? Who died?”

“You, we thought. You never came home last night.”

Sara Ruth settles on the slide. Lardo doesn’t notice her. Eric tilts his head and recognizes the thin black outline of the detractment spell she’s using. Good. She hasn’t lost her cautiousness.

“I did.” he says. “But it was late, and I left early. You must have missed me. Why didn’t you call me?”

“Jack has your phone, dumbass. You left it at Annie’s last night.”

He blinks. “Oh.”

“Yeah, Shitty tried to call you about eight times before Jack finally picked up. We couldn’t find you, so we went looking. Shitty’s out with Ransom on the other side of town.”

“Oh my god, I am so sorry.”

“Tell that to Shitty, he’s the one I had to wake up at five am. Jack said he’d drop your phone off at work on his way to practice.” She stops and looks around the playground. “What the fuck were you doing out here?”

“Meeting up with someone.” It’s not a lie.

“Most people pick indoors place at normal hours.” Lardo muses, then shrugs it off. “Whatever. You do enough odd things.”

Sara Ruth turns to look at him. _Later,_  he mouths. He’ll introduce them when her appearance won’t panic anyone.

“I appreciate you worrying about me.” he says.

“Yeah, well, I figure you can pretty much take care of yourself. Just wanted to be sure.”

Eric stands up. A small black cat slips between his legs and out of the playground.

————-

Eric sits on the floor of his grandmother’s living room, pushing his toes against the carpet. The adults have been talking for so long that the air in here is starting to go stale. He’s used to having every door thrown open, people wandering in and out. This afternoon the adults have sealed it shut. They’re having an _adult conversation._

He’s not sure what that’s about, but he’s getting sleepy in the tepid room. Sara Ruth is already out, her face pressed against an oversized armchair. She’ll be four next week. She’d been telling him that right up until she passed out.

He stares at the stuffed birds in the basket on the fireplace. They’re felted and decorated and no good for cuddling but he’s bored and tired. He blinks a couple of times and tries to feel them, tries to reach out for the colors behind his eyelids. One wiggles a few inches, falling out and onto the floor, but he can’t pull it any farther than that.

“-is it still an age question?”

“Even if the gap was removed I don’t think it would be.”

Eric gets up and grabs the bird. He lies down again and tucks it under his head.

“Your boy has a lot of talent. There couldn’t be a better choice.”

“Marnie, he’s _seven.”_

He just wants to sleep. He’s so tired of being in this house.

—————

“Alright.” Rousso sits down in the goalie box and scoots himself across the ice with his mitt. “This has been fun, I’m sure, but I we all know what we want to see.”

“What, you in retirement?” Snowy shouts across the rink. He leans back against the box lazily.

“You better start diggin my grave if you want that.”

“You wanna crouch down, try a Malarchuk, see how that goes.”

Rousso laughs heartily and leans back until he’s almost horizontal.

“See the thing is,” Snowy turns and grumbles to Poots, “he thinks I’m joking, but I’m dead serious.”

“I’d be happen to sharpen your skates if you want to give it a go.”

Jack shakes his head and sits down on the bench, leaning over to unlace his skates.

“Hey! Zimmermann! What do you think you’re doing?” Rousso yells. “I ain’t finished with you!”

“Practice is over, Rousso, go home.” Poots yells back.

“No! It’s been five goddamn days and this motherfucker- _this motherfucker_ \- has yet to show off his little song and dance. I want to see a wizard work, goddamnit. We’ve got a game coming up.”

Jack freezes. He was afraid of this.

He removes his hands from his skates. “I’m not planning on doing it again, Rousso.” he says measuredly.

“Come on, you fucker, you wanna help your team out or what?”

“It’s not fair to the other players.”

“Not fair? The Aces sure as hell weren’t being fair. I thought you understood that.”

“Ok, Rousso, that’s enough.” Snowy huffs under his breath. He turns over his shoulder to Jack. “It wouldn’t kill you just to do that a little more often?”

“Not. Interested.” Jack says, shoving his fists into the bench. “You’ve got Tater for that.”

“You’re ten times better than him.”

“You saw me in one game.” Jack winces. Even he can catch the hitch in his breath. This conversation needs to end, now, or he’s gonna fold in front of his entire team.

“Yeah, but now I get it.” says Snowy. “How your dad was so good. How _you_ used to be so good, shit, man, not that you’re not a godlike player on your own, but that play? Damn, it was like no one else was even on the ice.”

“Please stop.” It comes out more desperate than he means it to. He hides his left hand behind his back and clenches and unclenches it as fast as he can, trying to control his breathing.

“Fuck me, sorry.” Snowy rolls his eyes. “I thought you were the competitive one.”

He needs to go _right now._

Snowy turns his back, chewing on another comment, and Jack takes his opportunity to hobble towards the locker room on half-laced skates.

“Jack!” shouts Snowy behind him, but he keeps fumbling in the darkness. He collapses in the pitch blackness of the locker room, head between his knees, sweating through his jersey as he shakes.

_Please don’t follow me, please don’t follow me._ he prays.

“Jack?” Snowy walks in and turns on the light. He does a half lap around the room. “Where’d you go? You ok?”

He stops and looks around for a few more seconds. Jack closes his eyes and crawls into himself, breathing into a contained space in front of him.

“Where the fuck did he go.” Snowy says to himself, and turns to head out of the room. He passes a hair length away from where Jack is sitting.

It takes him a half minute to realize. Fuck. Shit. He’d done it _again._

————-

“Bruh.” Kent laughs and leans out into the aisle. “This is the coolest shit I’ve seen in my life.”

Jack grins and adjusts the width of his fingers, hovering the puck a little higher in the air between them. The red field around it glows like a stoplight in the center of the dark bus.

Juno stirs in the seat next to him, unsealing his eyes. “The shit is that?” he mumbles.

“What you’re missing out on.” Kent grins. He grabs an empty water bottle from the vacant seat next to him and lobs it at Juno, brushing him in the jaw. Juno sits up and leans over Jack’s shoulder.

“Goddamn.” he says.

“Just like his old man, huh?” Kent says. “He’s got more to him than his looks.”

“Please stop talking about him like that, it sounds like you want to fuck my dad.” Jack says.

“Given the opportunity I would.”

“Kent, you slut.” laughs Juno.

“What, like anyone here wouldn’t.”

“Can we please stop talking about fucking my dad.” Jack groans and drops the puck into his hand.

“Fine.” Kent sighs.

“You want to try that out on the ice sometimes?” asks Juno.

“Y’know, I never have.” says Jack. “But I’m sure we could make a play out of that.”

————-

It’s embarrassing, having to text Bitty from the darkened locker room, but his options are either call in the calvary or stay here for the rest of the day.

What’s worse is that in the past five he’s gone through the handful of meds he had. Fuck, this is a downspiral he did not need. He saw it coming, too, and that somehow makes it even worse. No amount of foresight could prevent his shitty brain deciding it wanted to have another shitty week.

Why did he have to be so petty? It was just Kent. The goddamn world wasn’t ending, it wasn’t a playoff game. It was just Kent.

————

“So we’re fucked.” Juno slams his stick into the floor of the bench. “There’s no way in hell we can get past their d-men. They’re too damn good.”

“C’mon, I’m not losing this in the first round.” Kent bodily rolls his eyes. “I don’t play that way.”

“We’re about to be if we can’t think of something.” Juno says. “Jack, you alive over there?”

Jack sits up, mostly leaning on Kent. “I just spent twenty-two minutes on the ice.”

“I know, but.” Juno casts a glance over to Wags and Swoops, who are leaning over the railing to chirp at the other team. He lowers his voice. “You can keep going, right? I think if we put Red on defense, we could get you a clean shot.”

Jack shakes his head. “I don’t need a clean shot. Keep it messy, it makes the refs less suspicious.”

“So you’re good?”

“Yeah. I’m not planning on going down in the first round either.” He pulls himself to his feet, feeling every pull of his calves as he does so. “Put Wags on offense, have him cause a distraction. Steal a stick, whatever works. I want the refs looking in a direction that isn’t mine.”

“Aye, aye, captain.” says Juno.

———-

“Am I good to come in?” Bitty knocks on the doorframe to the locker room, poking his head around. “Jack?”

“Yeah.” Jack croaks, removing his face from his knees. Bitty wanders in, skittish, his hands wrapped protectively around his body until he confirms they’re alone. He crouches down next to Jack and unwraps the bottle for him. Jack’s hands are shaking when he takes it from him. Bitty turns away as he cracks it open, chewing on his bottom lip and avoiding eye contact. He’s never been this much of a visible wreck when he’s had to call in Bitty before. Shit.

He downs the bottle and breathes into the back of his hand until it starts to work.

“Are you ok?” Bitty asks quietly. He doesn’t look up.

“I will be.” Jack says, and starts to unlace his skates. He slides them off and pushes them across the floor. “I mean, for the moment. Not sure about the long run.”

“Oh.” Bitty says.

“Hey.” Jack gets to his feet and pulls his stiff-dried jersey up over his head. His hands are still tremoring with the aftershocks. “I have a pretty smart doctor who doesn’t let me keep enough on hand to overdose. So you don’t have to worry about that happening again.”

It’s the first time he’s dried his dirty laundry in front of Bittle. He doesn’t like the concern worrying Bitty’s face, or the fact that he barely says anything. Not typically a good sign.

“Anything else you want to know?” he says, with a little more force than he means. He doesn’t want the pity. He wants to go home and sleep the rest of this off.

“What set it off?” Bitty asks quietly. “No, nevermind. You don’t have to- I shouldn’t have asked that.”

He decides to meet him halfway. “Teammates wanted me to play Potter.”

“But why don’t you?”

He’s asking honestly, even if it sets Jack’s teeth on edge. And he did open himself for this one. Motherfucker.

So he wants to know. Might as well, if he’s scraping Jack’s ass off the floor every twenty-four hours.

Jack digs through his locker until he finds a shirt that can pass as clean. He’ll shower when he gets home. “There are consequences to using magic. Come on, Bitty, you know that. You go too far, you pray the price. I-I abused it for years in juniors. Somebody else had to pay the price because of my mistakes. I’m never going there again.

Bitty stares at him, wide-eyed. “Jack, what are you talking about? That’s not how it works. There’s no karmic repayment for what you use.”

“Prove it to me.”

“I can’t. I just know that can’t be true. If that was the way magic worked, we’d all be a lot worse off. I mean, look at Nursey. Look at Tater. They’re doing just fine.”

“How do you know that? And what about you, Bitty? How can you stand there and say that there’s no consequences, when you lost-”

“When I lost what? My family? Jack, I’m gonna repeat to you what you said to me about Kent. Don’t assume you know what’s going on there. You have no idea.”

“Two people died.” he snaps.  “Two people are dead because of me, Bitty, for no good reason other than I cheated my way through the league. There’s my fucking reason.  I don’t care if there’s a connection. I’m not going to take the risk that there is one.” He pushes a hand through his sweat-stacked hair, willing it to lay flat. His hands are shaking too badly to do it well. Is he slipping again? It feel like the meds are barely working, fuck, sure he’s off the floor but not much else is happening. “For fuck’s sake, I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

Bitty steps back, folding his arms across his body.

“Jack.” he says, tentative. “I need you to come home with me. There’s something I need you to see.”

—————-

At one in the morning they break into the Canadiens rink.

Ransom cracks the lock, shouting “SCIENCE” at intermittent moments as he tries over and over to figure it out. In the end the determination of four margaritas gets him the energy he needs. Swoops and Wags grab a couple of sticks and pads from the locker room. They take turns scratching up the freshly-set ice. Wags is too drunk to keep his balance; he kneels on a pair of goalie pads and propels himself across the rink using a stick instead.

Jack’s head is buzzing comfortably. He’s more leaning on Kent than actually walking. The bartender at their hotel hadn’t bothered to card them; neither had the one at the bar three blocks down. Kent is vertical by a miracle, and well into blackout territory at this point.

They find a spot in the stands and Jack collapses into Kent’s lap. He makes a lazy pass at his thigh and closes his eyes, letting Kent play with his hair.

The draft is in three days. Jack is too smashed to stress about it, so mission success. He’s more concerned with the semi he’s developing and if Kent is going to try to make a real pass in front of half their team or if he’ll have the decency to at least hide behind the bleachers.

He rolls his head to look towards the rink. The slightly more sober boys aren’t so much playing as lazily tossing pucks at each other. Holster grabs a goalie pad off the sidelines and uses it as a shield to bodyslam Wags into the ground. He’s wearing his sneakers, not skates, and falls down quickly after.

Jack smiles and rolls back in, curving his body away from the rink into an arc on the bench. His cheek brushes the inside of Kent’s thigh. Kent makes a soft noise and pouts at him.

“Jackie, don’t tease.” he purrs, rubbing his thumb against the underline of Jack’s jaw. “I’m not gonna be awake by the time we get back to the hotel.”

“There’s always behind the bleachers.” says Jack. Kent gawks, mock-scandalized, like he wasn’t responsible for the shower room handjobs with half their team within earshot.

“You sly motherfucker.” says Kent. He wraps his hand around Jack’s tie and pulls him up until he’s mostly sitting on his own. He stands up and keeps one hand on Jack’s shoulder, guiding him in the direction of the away team locker room.

They stop in the darkened doorway and Kent turns to look back out at the ice.

“You lost?” asks Jack. He leans over, his body obscured by the shadows, and presses a messy kiss to the underside of Kent’s jaw.

“In a minute.” Kent mumbles, holding him at arm’s length. “Fuck with ‘em.”

He’s staring out at the fort of goalie pads Holster has crafted. Ransom and Wags are throwing pucks at him lazily, attempting to find a hole in his defenses.

Jack tries to focus, but his brain is all over the place. He at last fixes his gaze on the black of the hallway and uses that as an anchor to reach out into the rink. He swings the puck back like boomerang, kneecapping Wags, and blows Holster’s fort to the ground.

“‘mazing,” slurs Kent, then drags his deeper into the locker room, biting marks into Jack’s lower lip and neck.

———

They pull up and his hands aren’t shaking anymore, which is good, but it’s been replaced by a nervous little pit in his stomach. Bitty can barely make eye contact with him.

He focuses on the house instead. It’s a better point to direct his attention than whatever Bitty’s hiding, simply because there’s so much to distract him. He has an idea of how bad it was from the number of texts he’s gotten about the heating going out or holes in the ceiling or pipes bursting. Seeing it in person, though.

He restrains himself from asking why the place is still standing and walks in the door behind him. The door doesn’t close completely; the wood of the frame has bowed away with age above the door, leaving a cold draft that sits in the upper portion of the hallway.

Bitty dumps his coat into a pile developing on one of the chairs on the kitchen table and digs through it until he finds a navy cardigan. It’s a few sizes too big for him, but good lord, the house is cold.

Jack hangs his coat on the back of the chair. There’s a lot of clothes in that pile. He’s pretty sure he sees underwear.

“Admiring my luxury living?” Bitty teases. He digs through a drawer in the kitchen counter.

“Would you be offended if I called somebody to look at this place?”

“PLEASE.” yells someone from upstairs. Jack turns his head and sees no one.

“Huh. Didn’t think they were conscious.” says Bitty. He pulls out a ratted cardboard matchbox and closes the drawer, then opens the next one over. “And I’d appreciate it, but I’m warning you, this house is a project. There’s more to it than meets the eye.”

“What, is it charming?”

“No, fucked up on every level.” He takes a handful of candles and walks out to the living room. Every light in the house is off. Jack steps over a dog bed to get to one, and Bitty stops him.

“We leave those off on purpose.” he says.

“Why?”

“Saves us money on the electric bill so we can keep the heat on longer.”

“Fuck me, I’ve been failing you on my rich friend duties.” he forces. It’s hard to make any sort of joke when his nervousness is sitting on his tongue.

Bitty laughs. He stretches his legs out on the floor, pushing his back against the couch and reaching under it. He drags out a wooden frame, a five-pointed pentagon, with candle sockets hot-glued on to each corner. He sets a candle in each socket and lights a match out of the box. It explodes into life, casting sun-gold spots of lights into Bitty’s cupped hands.

Bitty isn’t smiling anymore. His eyes are sharp and focused on his work, face still flushed red from the cold.

“What are we summoning?” Jack asks. Bitty doesn’t answer, but lights every candle with shaking hands. The match goes out in his hands after the last one. He sits back and closes his eyes.

Jack sits down awkwardly, looking around the room. Bitty is so still he might as well be dead. The cold air increases in volume, dragging down to settle around him. There’d been the faint creak of the house accompanying him when he walked in here before, but now it is deathly quiet.

“Bitty.” he says, and something opalescent and fluid forms just out of his line of sight. He’s afraid to turn his head.

Bitty opens his eyes. “Jack, I’m sorry.”

He swallows his fear and swivels his body to face the other couch.

Ransom and Holster are sitting there.

“ _Oh.”_ he says, because his brain can’t work out much else.

“‘Sup, bro.” Holster waves feebly. “Long time, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“They’ve been haunting my attic.” says Bitty, reticent. “I should have told you earlier.”  

“So you’re what? Spirits? Ghosts?” He should be ecstatic. The black hole in his head sucks it up anyways. “Are you stuck here or something?”

“Oh, boy, I’ve been dying to do this.” Ransom giggles. “Jackie, man. Turn that frown upside down.”

“Turn that frown upside down? Are you five?” Holster leans forward, staring at Ransom incredulously.

“Who spent all yesterday watching Lazy Town?”

“I am eighteen, let me live.”

“ _Never._ You aren’t even alive.”

“Technicality! You’re calling a technicality!”

Jack remembers he should be smiling. There are hooks on his face, freezing it into place. He hold his breath and lifts them up with as much effort as he can muster.  

“Anyways.” says Ransom. “You clearly did not get ghost 101. We’ve spent years compiling this shit.”

“To answer your question: yes, we are stuck here. Kind of. But that’s not a bad thing.” says Holster.

“Every ghost has a mission they have to complete.” Ransom gets up and floats a few inches across the room. “There was an old lady here before us who had to make peace with her grandkids. That kind of shit.”

“And as far as we can figure out, we have to find out who shot us.”

“They never found any leads, I remember.” says Jack. “Did you see their face?”

Speaking is almost impossible, but how long does he have? A few minutes? A few seconds? The anxiety of losing them again is overwhelming everything else.

One thing it’s actually good for, ironically.

“Fuck no, it was dark as shit.” says Holster. “We haven’t got any more ideas than you do. And that’s good. That’s how we want it to be.”

“But don’t you want to- move on, or whatever?” Jack asks.

“Nope.” Ransom draws his arms up. “Not now. Why would we, when all our friends are still alive? We’re haunting your asses till you bite it, and then we’ll play mystery detectives.”

“Guys, one minute.” says Bitty, staring at the shortening candle.

“Ok. Next thing: we can only hold these forms for as long as the candles are lit. But that’s no big deal. As long as we’re close to our anchor- the weapon that killed us- we can possess animals. And witches can talk to animals pretty easily. We can go through Bitty, unless there’s something you’d like to tell us.”

“You can go through me.” he says, and he hears them talking about it, carrying on, but he pushes it aside and tries to hold on to the remaining shreds of his calm.

Bitty taps on his leg. “They’ve been possessing my dogs.” he says with a small smile. “I’ll teach you how to talk to them if you want. Lardo has them in my room right now.”

“Huh.”

He turns back and the candles have gone out. They’re gone.

“Jack.” says Bitty. “You ok?”

He doesn’t move. He can’t move. The hooks have wrapped their way three times around the floorboards, sealing his feet tight and his mouth shut. There is a flood welling up inside of him, a downpour of anger and relief and sadness, but it stays trapped behind the seal of his lips.

“Jack?”

“I have to go.” he says, without autonomy. He gets to his feet on the sole promise he is going home.

“I know, I should have told you earlier, I’m sorry-” Bitty babbles.

“Stop talking.” he huffs. He can’t process the input right now.

“Jack-”

He closes the door behind him as he goes, putting a solid barrier between him and Bitty. His hands are shaking uncontrollably. He has no idea how he’s going to manage the drive home, other than he will.

He has no other choice than to go on.

 


	8. the snowstorm, part one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIVE.  
> KK, so some serious personal shit that i will elaborate on later (because ironically, it is relevant) forced this draft to sit for a while. and i start school in two weeks. [screams]. just gotta keep going i guess.  
> i don't know what the fuck is up with my spacing. ive edited it like four times and it won't work, i think it's an ao3 coding thing because my draft is behaving. maybe its just something broken on my end. apologies in advance if it looks weird.

He means to call Bitty as soon as the door closes. Well, not quite that fast; Jack boils over in anger and anxiety for a few hours until the trainwreck decides to depart his body. He takes the brief moment of reprieve to set a reminder in his phone to call him first thing the next morning.

  
He's replaying Bitty's hurt face when he walked out of the door so much it might as well be the goal from last week.

  
Then the flight for the Avs game gets moved a day early to accommodate press, and he's sitting thirty thousand feet in the air when it goes off.  
_Later_ he promises himself. He delays it for after the game.

  
They lose, bad. The Avs get two goals in the first period and carry it all the way to a shutout. Rousso is an inch from losing his shit all over Jack in the locker room. He spits bile about how Jack could have prevented this, if he'd just grow a pair and play the fucking game, and then Snowy puts a fist in his chin and ends the conversation.

  
Jack slips away as Guy and Thirdy pull the warring goalies apart, hitting the showers early and making eye contact with the floor. He ignores and declines every comment from his teammates and managers about it. It's mildly effective.

Jack wonders, briefly, if he can weather this storm.

It’s not a question he dwells on for long. He knows he can; he’s been in downspirals far worse than this. If he survived those he’ll survive this one. He’ll be better.  
It still sucks.  
He goes back to his hotel room- a single, Red's out on injury, thank God- and snaps open his phone. The reminder sits there.  
Not now. It’s close to ten and he’s too worn out.

But he can’t just leave this out in the air like this; it’s been nearly a week. Bitty probably thinks he’s still mad.

_JZ: sorry i havent texted you_

_JZ: been very busy_

_JZ: Not still mad at you. I’ll call you when i get the chance, ok? we need to talk about it._

Bitty doesn’t respond, not immediately, so he slides over to Kent’s messages instead.  
_JZ: you have a competitor for trainwreck tonight_

_KP: doutb it_

_KP: smashedh in dalllllas_  
He sighs and stretches out, setting his phone down.

————

Jack stares at the ceiling and counts cracks again. It’s breeching four in the morning, and he’s been lying here since ten, he’s got that test tomorrow; technically today; _Christ,_ he’s running at full disaster right now. His phone goes off somewhere in the vicinity of his floor. Jack shifts in bed to get to it, wincing as he puts weight on his injured leg.

He misses the rink.

He’s still out another three weeks with a hamstring injury, just as Samwell was supposed to start their season strong. The Leafs recruiter had called yesterday to say they weren’t interested any longer.

 _Kent Parson,_ says the caller id, and if that wasn’t a sign from above that his life was headed straight for a trainwreck again. A year to go and he was sitting on his ass instead of on the ice. Kent could probably sense it from three thousand miles away.

 _Fuck it,_ he thinks, and picks up the phone.

“Hey.”

“Oh. Uh. Hi.” Kent sounds surprised he picked up. Justifiably. This isn’t the first time he’s called.

“What did you want?” Jack rubs at the space between his eyes and tries to sit up, but his leg screams out in protest.

“Just to talk. To say I missed you.”

“You know the Aces aren’t talking to me anymore, right?” He’d been in class when he’d got that call. His professor had watched him put down his phone. She’d pulled him into her office, talked about things like graduate programs and masters and for half a moment, he had considered it.

“This isn’t- you don’t have to come to Vegas.” Kent’s voice bends a little. “Jack. Could we just start over?”

Kent is calling him. Kent isn’t asking him to reopen this; Kent just wants a clean slate. Like nothing ever happened. Like there was never a fight, three, however many. Like he doesn’t have to deal with whatever they’ve left in the empty space between them for the past three years.

And he doesn’t want to deal with it, so he doesn’t.

“Sure. Let’s talk. What’s going on in Vegas?”

——————--  
They fly to Tampa after a rather disastrous press gauntlet the next morning. Jack is assailed by reporters asking about the future of the C, with Marty's leadership apparently under some kind of debate. It’s news-manufactured drama, but for a moment the Falcs forget the Rousso fight. Jack breathes again.

Tampa is a messy game. Rousso plays unusually nasty, sporting a dark purple bruise on his chin while he goes after every forward who comes close.

Tampa goes after him with a renewed vigor, shoving Jack too hard into the boards in the second. His back buckles, heavy and painful. He shakes it off and keeps going. He’s not about to let something as minor as an aggressive forward detract him from his goal.

They win 5-4. Jack, for once, is soaring. This is his game, and he’s playing it damn well.

He lets Snowy and Tater drag him out after the game. He plays the sober friend well enough, stands in the corner on his phone the entire time.

_EB: shit i just saw this_

_EB: gotcha, ive been real busy anyways_

_EB: that fucking game, though_

_EB: are you actively trying to give me a heart attack_

_JZ: Sorry?_

_EB: we won who cares im drinking in celebration_

_EB: where are you?_

_JZ: boys dragged me out_

_EB: Sweet jesus._

_EB: Jack Zimmermann? Out on a Friday night?_

_EB: i must alert the presses_

_JZ: haha who’s the presses_

_EB: shitty and lardo, obviously_

_EB: lardo’s made it her personal goal to compile Accurate News on Jack_

_JZ: nice._

_JZ: i should hire her as my manager_

_JZ: i dont know though georgia is really good_

_JZ: co-managers?_

_EB: i think lardo would actually die_

_EB: and i quote, “she would own my ass but i’d be ok with it”_

The next day they sit on the ground in Tampa for an hour and a half before the pilot makes the weather delay official. There's a snowstorm rolling into Providence. The plane gets kicked back into the terminal while they wait.  
Jack slips away and pulls out his phone, ignoring the vague chirping about having to call his girlfriend. It’s March 21st. He was last in Providence the third. Somehow the time got away from him.

“Hey.” Bitty picks up fast. “What’s up?”

“We’re on a weather delay, we might not get out of here for a few hours.”

“Yikes.” Bitty hisses.

“Yeah. You’re not still at work, are you?”

“Nah, took the day off.”

“Hey, about last time-” Jack’s voice gets a bit sticky, but he pushes on. They need to have this conversation.

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I should have told you earlier, Jack-”

He’s developing the edge in his voice that appears whenever he’s worked up and worried. Jack frowns. This isn’t the reason he called.

“Bitty,” he says. “It’s ok. I was mad, yeah, but I’m over it. I still need to apologize to you.”

“For what?”

“I should never have lashed out at you like that. Yeah, I was angry, I was- kind of a mess, but that doesn’t excuse it. I-Look, we’re going to have a talk later when I’m not five feet away from my managers about the details of this. Just because I have a problem doesn’t mean I have a free pass to treat you like shit. I wasn’t in control. I still did it. I owe you an apology for that.” So there. That’s out there.

“Thank you.” Bitty says quietly.

  
“Yeah. Hey, about this storm coming in. Have you bothered to look at the weather?”

  
“Um. Sort of? I just know it’s a lot of snow.”

 

  
“Snowstorms are serious business. Especially this one. We’re supposed to get like eight inches.”  
“The house will take it.”

  
“You don’t know how much eight inches is. Bitty, I’ve seen your house. It will not take it.”

  
Bitty chokes. “What are you suggesting?”

  
"I've got an extra key, I can-"

  
“Jack, no.”

  
“I have a functioning apartment with a backup generator. My heat probably won’t go out. Even if it does it’s pretty well insulated.”

  
“Jack-”

  
“Please indulge me on this one, ok?” He turns to look at the gate, twenty hockey players sitting on their gear and staring at the graying sky outside.  “I won’t be out of here for a few hours. It’ll make me feel better to know you’re safe. I’ll text you how to get in.”

  
“Alright. Thanks.”  
———-  
When they land in Providence it’s to a coat of new snow, four new inches accumulating on top of the persistent two that have been there all winter. The winds have settled, leaving only the raw snow capping over the roofs of the town.

Reed dismisses them as soon as they touch down. There’s no talk of tomorrow's practice, which is likely canceled at this point. Jack, as a young, single guy with no family in town, is an exception in an older team. Most of his teammates need to get home to bundle up for the storm ahead.

The roads are abandoned and icy. Jack clenches the steering wheel and skates along at a slow twenty miles an hour to avoid spinning out.

It is very nearly three am.

The lights are off in the lobby of his apartment complex, but the heat is still working. They must be off due to the extremeness of the hour. Jack is daydreaming about finally going to bed.

He digs his keys out of his pocket and opens the front door as quietly as he can. Bitty is sitting on his couch, covered in blankets stolen from the guest room and buried deep in his laptop. Holster is asleep on the floor next to him.

  
“Hey.” He looks up and puts his laptop aside, sliding his feet up to make room on the couch. Jack drops his bags against the front counter. He grabs an icepack out of the fridge and presses it to the still-burning patch on his back.

  
“You ok?” Bitty asks. “I saw that hit, but it didn’t look that bad.”

  
“No, it was bad.” He winces and sits down on the couch next to him.

  
Bitty tsks. “What the fuck do these teams have out for you, Jack.”

  
“This is normal? Well. Mostly. Where’s everyone else?”

  
“Shitty and Lardo stole your bedroom.”

The light comes on in the hallway. Jack sits up and twists his head to look as a teenager he doesn’t recognize meanders out of his guest room.

“Oh. Hi.” She looks up from her phone, pushing her messy curls out of her face with her free hand. “Who are you?”

It’s bizarre to get that reaction. He kind of likes it.

“Is this Jack?” she asks. She has an accent deeper than Bitty, one that picks and strings at words.

“Oh, yeah. Jack, this is my cousin, Sara Ruth. She came up from Georgia for a week or two.”

She waves half-heartedly over the light of her phone. “Where’s my charger?”

“You left it on the counter.”

“Thanks.” She starts toward the kitchen and turns to look at Jack. “Jesus, what did you do to your back? I can feel that from here.”

“Took a bad hit at work.” Jack answers.

“K, shirt off.” She grabs her charger and moves over to the living room, rummaging through a quilted duffel on the floor. Jack stares at her for a moment.

“Just do it.” Bitty says. “She’s a healer, she knows what she’s doing.”

“Ok.” he says reluctantly. He undoes the top few buttons of his shirt and peels it back to expose the bruise on his back. Bitty makes intimate eye contact with the floor.

  
Sara Ruth pulls a water bottle full of a dark liquid out of her bag and walks over to the couch. “Yikes.” she says, recoiling slightly. “You need a less abusive hobby.”

  
She uncaps the bottle and dips a finger inside, tracing a vague shape on his back with it. It’s cold against him, a chill deeper than the snow outside. She lays her hand over the shape, steepling her nails into his back. There’s a tugging sensation, like a hook placed into his skin, then it’s gone in a brief second. His back feels fine.

  
She stands back up and stretches her legs out, recapping the water bottle and underhanding it back into her bag. “I’m going back to bed.” she says.

  
“Huh.” Jack buttons his shirt back up, watching her walk down the hall. “She’s talented.”

“Haven’t met a better one. Why, are you starting a list of my friends to steal for your hockey team?” Bitty lifts his head.

“Is she even eighteen?” says Jack.

“Seventeen.”

“I don’t think Georgia would hire a sports medic that’s still in high school.” He leans back into the couch, pulling his legs up to fit. “We need to talk.”

  
“Yeah, we do.” Bitty shoves his blanket pile off and closes his laptop. With the sickly glow of the LCDs gone, the only light in Jack’s living room is the faint gleam of the moonlight off the snow three stories below. Bitty slides off the couch to sit on the floor, a silhouette in the darkness. He pats on the ground and Jack moves down as well. Holster is a barrier between them, not stirring despite the movement.

“You or me first?” says Bitty.  
“I didn’t realize you had-”

  
“My cousin is here and I’ve never once mentioned my family to you. Of course you think something’s up. You’re just too polite to ask.” He can’t see it in the dark, but he can imagine all too well Bitty shaking his head in exasperation.

  
“Alright. Me first.” Jack decides. He’s got to get this over with. “What do you know about my overdose?”

Bitty knits his fingers together over his knees. “I mean, I read a lot, when I first met you, but I don’t trust any of it. Lot of people like to speculate you were on crack or something. But even if you used to be that person, you aren’t now, and I’ve-” He curls his hands inward. “-I’ve seen enough to know that whatever you’re on now you need it. You just kind of shut down.”

He hates talking about this. _Me too, buddy,_ think Jack inwardly. But it needs to happen.

“I’ve got an anxiety disorder. First showed up when I was in juniors. I never did any hard drugs. I overdosed on my anxiety meds.”

“Oh,” says Bitty, and it twists out of his mouth curved and tainted.

  
“I’m just going to set the record straight and say I was not trying to kill myself.” Jack says. He’s surprised with the clarity of his own voice. “Not that it matters anymore.”

He slides off the couch and pushes his hands into Holster’s coat, stunned with the fact that he’s done this. It’s out there, hanging in the air.

  
“You don’t have to go any further than that.” Bitty says.

  
“No, I know, it’s just- no one knows the details except my parents and my therapist, because telling the truth to anyone else runs the risk of it hitting the press. But I kind of wish it could sometimes. I’m not the only kid to go through the draft with that kind of pressure. If it wouldn’t be career suicide I’d love to tell some kid they could get help, that it’s not weakness. Press would have too much of a field day, though. They’d miss the point.”

  
_Are we still talking about your anxiety or something else?_

“And you trust me with it?”

  
“Well, yeah.”

  
“How do you know?”

  
“We’re having this conversation, aren’t we?” There it is, the tide rising in his throat. He tips forward and pushes his face into dog, exhales. “I mean. It’s not easy.” He wraps his hand around Holster’s paw and plays with the toe pads. “But I’m trying anyways because I want you to know.”

  
Pause. Breath.

He grabs on to Holster’s fur so tightly that he seizes slightly. Bitty’s silhouette moves in the darkness, calmly stepping over the dog and setting a hand on Jack’s shoulder.

  
“Does this help at all?” he asks.

  
“A little, yeah.” Jack laughs, and he can feel his eyes growing damp. He takes Bitty’s hand off his shoulder and wraps their fingers together, focused in the smoothness of his small fingers. “I’m doing a lot better now.”

“Good.” Bitty’s voice is sure and strong, a rock in the center of the storm. God. “What do you need from me?”

“I don’t know. I’m probably going to go try to get my meds adjusted next week, I don’t think this set is working that well. You’ll have to play with the substitute to match it if I do....” He trails off, trying to distance himself from his words. Fuck, this isn’t easy.

Bitty wraps his free arm around Jack’s back and pulls him into his chest.

  
“It’s ok.” he says firmly. “Take a minute. I’m so proud of you for saying all that.”

  
Jack fits his arms into his lap and lets himself be held there. The hooks are sewing his mouth shut at last after letting so much spill out. He sighs, breathing into the space of Bitty's chest. Bitty's hands slot over his arms, the small spread of his fingers holding him steady. He can’t stop the tremor in his hands or his chest but it’s as if Bitty is trying his damndest to keep him from shaking himself apart.

  
“We can get to my shit tomorrow.” Bitty says; Jack has once again lost track of time. “You want to get some sleep?”

  
He nods into Bitty’s chest. “Shits and Lardo-”

  
“We can stay here.” Bitty grabs the discarded blanket pile and throws it over Jack’s shoulders. He climbs back onto the couch; Bitty settles on the floor using Holster as a pillow.

  
Jack rolls over and slips his hand onto Bitty’s one last time, running his thumb along his slim wrist. “Thank you.”

  
Bitty nods and rolls over, his eyes falling shut. Jack watches for a few moments as his body wears off the tremors. He feels odd, in a negative space between terror and incredible calm.

He’s going to weather this one out. Of that he is sure.  
———  
Jack wakes up at seven, according to his phone, but he’s sure his phone must be lying. They'd slept so briefly it feels more like an extended nap than a night. Holster is awake and putting up with Bitty’s use of him as a pillow.

Holster turns his head. “Bro, help.” he whines softly. Jack drops and picks Bitty up, lifting him on to the couch. Feelings? Emotions? Nah. He’s just going to bottle that shit right up right next to how surprisingly heavy Bittle is. Time to start the coffee instead of dealing with it.

Eric wakes up about twenty minutes later and stumbles into the kitchen, bleary eyed. He takes the coffee from Jack’s hands without saying a word. Jack waits a few minutes while he regains conciousness.  
"You feeling better?" he asks finally. He leans over Jack’s flawlessly shiny counters and tries to fix his hair in its muddled reflection.  
"Yeah, loads." Jack slumps into the counter next to him. "Sleeping it off is sometimes the best way to handle it."  
Holster stretches out across the room and gets to his feet. He sticks his icy nose against Jack's calves.  
"Morning to you too, asshole." Jack smiles. Holster lies back down on his feet and sits there.  
Eric takes another long sip of his coffee. "I never got to it, last night. What I was going to tell you."  
"You don't have to."  
"Yeah, well, these assholes already know," he says, gesturing at Holster, "so I might as well bring you into the fold. There's been some drama going on back home. My grandmother died last week."  
"Jesus, Bittle, I'm so sorry."  
"Don't worry about me, that's not got me torn up or anything. She was no saint. But she had a lot of power. My family- well you know them, even if you think you don’t.” His eyes flick across the kitchen counter. Jack tries to decide what they settle on, but it’s impossible. “We’ve been in charge of this, ah, rather famous baking company for fifty or sixty years. My grandmother was effectively the head. She had an apprentice she’d appointed as her successor, because tradition, I guess. The Bittles are ridiculous to even me.”  
He drinks in his coffee like it's a equivalent input of liquid to words. "There's been some debate about honoring her choice. Sara Ruth and I are the oldest grandchildren. Our opinion carries a lot of weight back home. So she came up so we could draft our official decision and hopefully quiet the family drama.”  
"Hasn't it been a few years since you lived there?"  
Eric laughs, iron-hard and sour. "I know, right? I haven't seen these people in years. I basically told them to fuck off, don't let the door hit you on your way out. And somehow what I think still matters."  
There's an undertone to his voice, angry and raw, that leaves Jack with the feeling this isn't all of it. He's never heard Bitty speak like this, pivoting on the edge of fury. He's usually so kind. Even when he's pissed off he runs at it subtly.

Bitty sets his coffee down and sighs. “I should probably get breakfast going.”

“Anything I can do?” Jack asks.

“Not really. I mean, I’ve got no idea what you’ve got in your kitchen, but;” he shrugs and opens the pantry. “it’s not like we can go out. I’ll work with what I’ve got. You can just stand there and look pretty.”

Jack nods and leans back against the counter. Bitty starts rooting through his pantry, shoving through mostly empty shelves. He picks up a jam jar with a faint look of disgust on his face.

“What?”

“Smuckers? Bless your heart. I could do you way better.”

“Drop by more often.” Jack purrs back. He likes the look of Bitty in his kitchen, where everything is a little too tall and clean for him.

“I might. Good lord, you’re a walking advertisement for Whole Foods.” He reaches up on his tiptoes to get to the bag of flour on the top shelf. Jack gets up and walks behind him to get it.

“Stop, you.” Bitty tisks, and shoves him away with a lazy hand. “I’ve got it.”

He closes his eyes and calmly levitates the bag down to his level.

“What are you making?” Jack asks.

“I can probably do biscuits with this, they’re pretty hard to fuck up. You have milk and eggs, right?”

“I should, but I have no idea how old they are.” Jack cracks open the fridge and pulls out the cartons. Bitty takes the milk out of his hands and cracks the top. He sniffs it and gags a little bit.

“Jesus. When did you buy this?”

“It’s been a few weeks since I’ve made a grocery run. And I’ve been out of town-”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m getting the idea.” Bitty sets it down on the counter and balances a towel on his shoulder. He pushes his hand against the counter absentmindedly. Jack’s never looked too close at his hands before, how they’re rough around his knuckles, unexpected callouses forming on the pads of his fingers. He would have thought a baker would be smoother.

 _Focus, Zimmermann._ This is neither the time or place.

“I’ll work with it.” Bitty reassures him. “Lord knows I’ve done more with less.”

He crouches down to the island. “Where do you keep your-”

“Third drawer to the left.”

Bitty nods and flexes his hand out, stacking bowls in the air and pushing open a space on the counter. He works in relative silence, humming some tune Jack recognizes but can’t identify under his breath. His peach t-shirt, old and wrinkled from being slept in, crinkles further as he occasionally wipes a floury hand on it.

“What do you even eat?” he asks.

“With the team, usually. My trainer handles it. We’re on a pretty strict diet.”

“Huh. You’ll have to send that to me.”

“Why?”

“Dammit, Zimmermann, let me fill out your pantry a bit.”

Jack laughs, his eyes crinkling wide and dark. “I don’t think I’m allowed to eat anything you make.”

Bitty puts a finger over his lips. “Shh. Don’t tell your trainer.”

“At least she keeps me in shape.” Jack says. “Maybe she could put a few more inches on you.”

Bitty gasps, mock offended. “You are the _worst,_ sir.”

He pushes hard into the dough forming beneath his fingers and uses it as an excuse to look over the counter and into the living room. Holster and Ransom are awake but sleepy, yapping to each other and occasionally wrestling. They’re not paying a heavy modicum of attention.

“Is there anything else I should know?” he asks, dropping his voice. “About last night. Things I should avoid talking about or something.”

He turns to look at Jack, soft and worried, and Jack fights back a flood of affection. Kent had never done this. Kent had just given him a cursory pat on the back and left him to recover. Bitty’s a rock he never knew he needed until now.

“Not, not a whole lot, no.” Jack says, clearing his throat. “Hockey and stuff doesn’t normally bother it, unless ESPN are being dicks. It’s funny, kind of. I’m fine eighty percent of the time and this stuff just sort of rolls off me. I don’t mind the other teams, and they go after me all the time for my juniors shit. Just a handful of things hit the right button I guess. I don’t mind talking about magic things but as soon as you touch on mine it’s a problem? Fuck, brain, you’re fickle and weird.”

“Gotcha.” Bitty returns to his dough. He makes it so easy to talk sometimes. It still has the rough, awkward, rusty taste that talking to Alicia or his therapist likes to bring along, but he can do it and that alone is a miracle.

“Listen, I’m planning on going to my grandma’s funeral.” Bitty says. “I know I said we weren’t close, but my mom- she’s got four siblings, I have too many cousins to count, and they’re going to be upset. I want to be there for them.”

“Oh, yeah, shit. Do you need help flying down there? I know the airports are fucked, but my dad’s got a private plane-”

“It’s not going to be for a while. You know how my family is- well, you don’t, I guess, but you know they’re absurd and traditionalist. They’re saving her funeral for the next full moon, April 22nd. I mean, when ninety percent of your family is witches, preserving a body isn’t really a problem.”

“I can still fly you down there.” Jack says. “And Sara Ruth- when is she leaving? I can help with that too.”

“You’re a gem, Jack. She was planning on staying through the 7th. But that’s not what I’m asking. Do you have a game that day?”

Jack thinks, baffled. “We play the Preds the 18th. I should be ok for a week after that.”

“Would you come with me?”

Jack says nothing, just stares at him. Bitty sighs.

“Look, when I left Georgia, it wasn’t on the nicest of terms. My parents, some of my cousins, we’re still talking, but there’s also still a lot of bad blood. A lot of people aren’t going to be happy that I show up.”

“And you don’t want to go alone.”

“Yeah.” Bitty taps his fingers into the counter.

“Sure.” Jack spills out.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Bitty smiles, not wide, but it’s important. “Thank you.” he says.

Jack brushes his tongue against his teeth and places a jittering hand on Bitty’s shoulder. Bitty leans into it for a moment, then shakes him off. “Come on, we need to get these in the oven.” he says.

———-  
Sara Ruth wanders in around eight, eight-thirty. She walks over to the window and pushes back the curtain, her eyes blinking hard to adjust to the  white falling around her.  
"Je-sus," she sighs, chewing on the second syllable. "That's a lot of snow."  
"Don't go out, we might not be able to see you." Bitty chirps. His voice is thickened, heavy and round, Jack's never heard his accent that strong before. He's used to it being more of a suggestion than a full-forced thing.  
She glances over at Bitty and dips to grab Ransom off the floor.  
"How long do you think we'll be here?" Bitty asks Jack.  
"The weekend, at the least. This is a bad one."  
"Really?"  
“We got something like twelve inches last night. And it’s still coming down.”  
“Jesus, what is this, Buffalo?” Shitty stumbles into the living room, groaning and rubbing at his face.  
Jack laughs. “We don’t even get this much snow at home.”  
“That’s shocking.” says Shitty.  
“It’s Montreal, not Vancouver. Snowfall’s not that bad.”  
“Annd you’ve forgotten your english again.”  
"A u moins je sais que plus d'une langue. "  
“It's too early for this," yawns Lardo. She's taken the Bitty route of cocooning herself in the comforter, a warm, cotton-covered snake. “Hey mom, wanna make me breakfast?”  
Shitty frowns. “Lardo, he doesn’t have to be the group mom. That’s reinforcing gender stereotypes-”  
“Ok, but if we’re going by stupid straight people rules he is the group mom, though-”

“Breakfast’s already in the oven.” Bitty cuts them off with a yawn.

“You’re a god.” says Holster.

“How much longer on that?” Jack dips his elbows into the top of the couch.

“Should probably go get it.” Bitty rolls over on the couch to check his phone. “Yeah. Those are about ready.”

He looks at Jack and jerks his head, beckoning. Jack pushes off the couch and follows him into the kitchen.

He stands there, feeling slightly useless, while Bitty finds his towel and drops into a squat to pull the biscuits out of the oven. But it’s alright. He’s the planet Bitty is orbiting around, and he’s happy to just stand here and exude gravity.

He steps forward just as Bitty stands up and back, and they end up almost fitting together like two jigsaw pieces.  
For half a moment it's normal. For half a moment Bitty doesn't seem to notice. For half a moment Jack could reach out and set his hands on Bitty's hips and it would just be another morning.  
Bitty hums and steps back another quarter of an inch, making contact with his thigh, and that's what breaks it. He reels back to the oven, a flush spreading deep up his neck. Jack wonders, briefly, how it would feel to put that flush there, then buries it. The timing isn't right.  
They say nothing else, and Eric finds the plates in dead silence. They sit around the fireplace and eat. Shitty starts up a conversation with Jack about Drunk History. The moment passes.  
At some point the conversation turns to Georgia. Sara Ruth puts down her plate.  
"Well, we don't get snowstorms like this, but we had a tornado go through a few years ago. Remember that, Dicky?"  
Eric nods, because he does, it was three years ago and he'd spent the night huddled in his parent's basement.  
Ransom chokes. " _Dicky?_ "  
His brain finally decides to catch up. "Oh lord, don't bring that back."  
"I'm holding that one over your head for the rest of your natural life." she says.  
" _Dicky???_ "

If he doesn't explain he's about get tackled by two heavy frat dogs.  
"My mom called me that," he says, "she didn't mean it that way."  
Lardo makes very even eye contact with him, obviously biting back a joke.  
"Anyways," he coughs loudly. "Weren't you telling a story?"  
"I just realized how much power I have." Sara Ruth says. "They don't know any of your stories, do you?"  
"Don't do it." he warns.  
"Please." Holster starts. “I need this in my life.”

She smiles and slides her phone out of her back pocket. “I have pictures of you from middle school, Eric. Don’t test me.”

Holster leans over her shoulder. “Oh my god, what is this haircut?”

“I may have bleached it once.” Bitty says into his hands. “I was thirteen. We all make mistakes.”

“He made his mom do it.” giggles Sara Ruth. “She said it looked ‘hip.’”

“Huh.” says Jack. “You do an excellent impression of a mop.”

Bitty snaps his head up. “You wanna go?”

“Have you grown since middle school?”

“I could text your mom and have your baby pictures in five minutes, flat.”

“You don’t even have my mom’s number.”

“She wouldn’t even question it.”

Ransom nudges Holster in the shoulder. “Do they know we’re in here too?” he whispers.

Holster rolls on his back and starts to hum, which is near impossible with a dog’s jaw. “I can see what’s happening-”

“This is ridiculous.”

“-and they don’t have a clue-”

“We’re gonna need a spatula to separate them.”

“They’ll fall in love, and here’s the bottom line-”

“Are you singing Lion King?” Bitty looks up from trying to wrench Jack’s phone out of his hands. Whoops. Busted.  
\------  
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Shitty drops to his knees in the kitchen, digging through cabinets in a madcap search for something after mumbling about _starting this fucking party._ “Do you even realize how much money you have, bro?”  
“It’s fair to say I don’t.” Jack says."My, uh, my mom helped me find the place.”  
“Fucking fantastic.” Shitty returns to his feet and cracks open the fridge. He turns to Jack with a look of disgust on his face. “The fuck is this?”  
“What?”  
“Where’s your alcohol, man? I’m about to spend the next forty-eight with you fuckers. I need something.”  
“I don’t really drink.”

“I could have told you that, you fake fan.” yells Lardo across the room.  
“Ughhhhh.” Shitty moans dramatically. “You are useless as the rich friend.” He straightens up and digs in the pile on the counter for his coat. "Ok. We're rectifying this."  
"We can't go out-"  
"Watch me. You two in?"  
"No, I'm warm." yells Lardo. Bitty has his laptop out, worrying a spot on his lip as he works. He shakes his head without verbally responding.  
"Just you and me, bro." says Shitty. "We'll be fine. You can get us out of any tight spots."  
"I'm really not sure I can." says Jack, wary. He grabs his coat anyways.

The door is easily openable- benefits of a third floor apartment- but the snow is ankle-deep once they reach the bottom. At seven pm the sun hangs low in the sky, just on the edge of setting. Providence is a skeleton laid bare, white and gray and yellowed by the streetlamps peppered every few feet. If he had thought the streets quiet the night before, now they were at a standstill, rendered useless by a slushy concoction of salt and old snow.

Shitty flicks his phone out of his jeans pocket and turns the flashlight on, using the glare to catch icy patches as they walk. He’s bundled up tight but doesn’t look too cold. Jack tries to remember where he’s from. Andover? It was something pretentious like that, he’s sure Bitty told him at one point but he doesn’t remember it.

“You catch the Riveters game the other night?” Shitty asks. Jack smirks. It’s the perfect intersection of everything Shitty loves. The man is not that difficult to read.

“Was kind of busy getting my ass kicked by Tampa.” he says. “I was planning on watching it later.”

“Good. Kessel killed it. When’s the next time you play Pittsburgh?”

“April, I think.”

“Do you think I could get you to misdirect the refs while we switched which one was on the ice?”

Jack laughs. “Like we weren’t going to lose already. That would just guarantee it.”

“Come on, you guys have been having an ok season.”

“We’re not gonna beat the Pens in our current state. There isn’t a chance.”

“Hey, speaking of people you probably know. What’s the backstory with that one ESPN anchor calling you Squid #2? Does he just think he’s hilarious?”

Jack smiles to himself. “He didn’t come up with that. No, no, that was a very smashed Seguin at the afterparty from our January game.”

“Jack Zimmermann going to an afterparty? What planet have I woken up on?”

“Take two guesses who dragged me there.”

“Oh, I’m guessing. He looks like a bewildered cow and he’s attached at the hip to Kent Parson’s body double.”

“And after they beat us, too! I guess southern hospitality applies to Texas? Anyways, Tyler decided I’m Squid #2.  Squid #1 is Sid, obviously. According to some people we look similar? Nevermind he’s older than me and we play _nothing_ alike. Sober Tyler thinks Drunk Tyler’s fucking awful jokes are Emmy material. Next morning he uses it in a postgame and well,” Jack shrugs. “You know ESPN eats that shit up.”

Shitty nearly bends in half, shaking with laughter. “That’s incredible. I fucking love your life.”

His laughter echoes across the street, bouncing across windows of empty buildings with nothing out here to quell the noise. They could be on another plane of reality right now, in the half-light, surrounded by mountains of still-falling snow with not a soul seen alive. He’s seen nothing to confirm that anyone else exists on this boulevard.

They round the corner. The liquor store he assumes Shitty is going to is just up the block, although he can’t imagine it’ll be open.

“So what’s the deal with Bitty’s cousin?” Jack lowers his voice, even though there’s no one around to overhear them.

“I mean, I’m assuming he’s told you the same shit he told us. She came up to help him settle a problem back home. Unless he’s added more to that story.”

“No, no, that’s all I know.” Jack looks at Shitty with bewilderment. “Why would he tell me more than what you know?”

“Just. You know.” Shitty waves a hand. “He trusts you. And he’s been more than a little on edge lately. I’m not asking you to spill. Just thinking about it.”

 _He trusts you._ Jack feels his throat go dry. It shouldn’t be surprising. Given last night’s conversation, it goes both ways.

He’s thinking about this morning again, about Bitty asleep on the floor, looking so small and vulnerable curled up next to the couch that he had to remind himself Bitty could probably pick him up with one hand if he wanted to. He’s thinking about how he lifted him off the ground and tucked him back in on the couch. He’s repeating that mantra of _oh god, I want this,_ over and over again, even though there’s a million reasons he can’t have it.

He’s everything Bitty isn’t. Bitty’s the best witch he’s ever met, he’s riddled with talent and probably has more of a future than Jack ever will-

and Jack? Jack would just take any opportunity to flush the taint of magic from his system. He wishes he could just patch up his own back without losing it. He’s done. He’s tired.

“Damn.” hisses Shitty, as they walk up on the liquor store. “Closed.”

“You suprised? Nobody’s out in this.”

Shitty stands on his toes and peers through the glass of the front doors. “Think you could-”

“I think that’s technically robbery.”

“I have money. Watched a cousin do this once. You can just alter their register, it’s not complicated.”

Jack sighs. He wants to. Fuck, he wants to be useful. But the one part of his brain operating on rationality betrays the rest of it, the part bellowing for him not to.

He wonders if they’ll ever figure out a medication strong enough to let him use his magic again.

“You really overestimate what I’m capable of.” he settles on instead.

“Hey, if you’re uncomfortable, I can just-” Shitty drops to his knees and picks the lock with ruthless efficency. He slides in while Jack stands outside, staring at the snowy ground and the clouds his breath forms against the nearly-black sky. He allows himself to slip out of their immediate surrounding and into the all-encompassing nothingness of the world around him, the soft bird calls and murmurs behind apartment windows down the street. Jack skates straight to the edge of what he can manage, settling a heavy blanket over the traces of Shitty’s presence in the liquor store, but any further and the panic starts to set in his head. Even the act of covering his friend’s tracks is leaving an uncomfortable buzz. Jack unclenches and reclenches his hands a few times and resets to just listening. He won’t kill anyone with just listening.

He resets to this morning. He can’t escape this morning.

Why the fuck can’t he just get something he wants for once?

 _No,_ he realizes, if he’s gonna deal with The Illness and all the associated baggage he’s not gonna restrict himself from this one. Fuck it, he deserves to be happy. Bitty makes him happy. He can let loose his chokehold on his personal life once in a while and allow himself to dwell in that fact. Jack has no idea if the feeling goes both ways or even how far he wants it to go. He’s just thinking about morning-messy blond hair and the accent that forgets itself unless in the presence of other Georgians and he holds on to these things, grabs them as tightly as he can. It’s the one thing in his life he can control.

He might as well let himself have this.

Shitty reemerges a few minutes later with a bottle of tequila stashed under his arm. “Earth to Jacky. We going?”

“Yeah.” Jack exhales and detaches himself from the world around him. “Yeah, let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so that was a jack omnibus. baby i love you. you're my exercise in projection.  
> up next: some povs you haven't gotten to see yet and a lot more of the Bittle Family Drama.  
> can you tell who my fave actual hockey players are yet? im transparent and i enjoy trash. but seriously, in a world where both exist, you can't tell me segs and kent wouldn't hang out all the time. they'd make the Dumpster Duo.


End file.
